&gt;Consider a new user, with no experience in office software at all.<p>But is that even a reasonable share of the market any more? I&#x27;m hardly a spring chicken and I was exposed to Office in elementary school. I would imagine that the proportion of people who&#x27;ve never used an office suite (and can&#x27;t use Google to search for answers for how to do things) is fairly small at this point.<p>In my experience, adding the Ribbon was a huge step backwards in terms of usability, not because the Ribbon is inherently bad, but because it was a very big, very abrupt change from the File | Edit | View ... menu system that preceded it. I was working on an IT helpdesk at the time the Ribbon rolled out (with Office 2007), and the backlash from users who couldn&#x27;t apply the same set of steps that had always worked for them to do things like adjust paragraph spacing was immense.<p>I feel like Microsoft was blinded by its focus groups. Perhaps the focus groups included people who weren&#x27;t familiar with Office, or with computers at all, and that skewed the results enough to make it seem like the Ribbon was a good idea. But in practice, the cost of adopting the UI is not just the cost of learning the new UI, but also the cost of <i>forgetting</i> the UI that preceded it. The Ribbon might be great if you&#x27;re starting from scratch with a new UI, but the existing Office 2000 UI was so entrenched, the cost of forgetting was huge.