I think it's "unnecessary change" that people hate, well on some level. Current MS Office probably is no more of an effective solution than a very old version of Word/Wordpress/Lotus for a large proportion of the population - can you write a letter or CV with it? Yes, well there you go.
So why not give people what they want, familiarity, simplicity. For Microsoft I think the answer would be that then they wouldn't have sold so many copies of new versions of MS Office. It's largely sales/fashion driven rather than meeting further technical needs of users.
People actually love change - the fashion industry is built on that assumption. Shiny-shiny has probably sold far more tech and software than technical needs ever have.
FWIW for me the ribbon based UI paradigm is no better or worse than erstwhile standard of menubar+toolbars [but I've not spent long using MS's ribbons].
Too true. The past 15 or so years has felt like new Office releases were dictated to by the need to sell more copies of Office to existing customers rather than any major improvements to the application. I remember one release where the biggest change was a shift from a MDI to a single window per document.
Office has probably reached a point where there's little you can do to actually make it more functional nor powerful, but it sometimes feels like a con when the revisions are essentially skin deep.
(I will accept that 2007 did cone with some major changes though, such as OOXML)
Actually Office, in my opinion, just had something added that makes it infinitely better: Skydrive integration.
Having files autosave and autoupload after each save means that I never have to worry about losing stuff ever again, I also happen to be completely bought-into the MS ecosystem, with a WP, W8.1 laptop and W8.1 tablet.
I think it's "unnecessary change" that people hate, well on some level. Current MS Office probably is no more of an effective solution than a very old version of Word/Wordpress/Lotus for a large proportion of the population - can you write a letter or CV with it? Yes, well there you go.
So why not give people what they want, familiarity, simplicity. For Microsoft I think the answer would be that then they wouldn't have sold so many copies of new versions of MS Office. It's largely sales/fashion driven rather than meeting further technical needs of users.
People actually love change - the fashion industry is built on that assumption. Shiny-shiny has probably sold far more tech and software than technical needs ever have.
FWIW for me the ribbon based UI paradigm is no better or worse than erstwhile standard of menubar+toolbars [but I've not spent long using MS's ribbons].