The net result is so wildly different from the traditional UI that I fear a lot of people will have a hard time adapting. If nothing else, the redesign will intimidate many of the non-nerd-folk of the world and cost Microsoft sales.
One of the chief features of menus was that they would display their functions in reasonably plain text. However, with the Ribbon, everything is suddenly a button.
Personally, I don't care how it looks as long as the keyboard shortcuts are the same. However, the crux of this issue is consistency. For most people, switching their brains is difficult enough even when they have similar interfaces.
The problem arises when it is discovered that the traditional ways are inefficient. The modern keyboard is a perfect example of the problem of consistency. It was designed to be horribly inefficient yet remains the standard because it was the first to be universally adopted in the days of typewriters. However, since it is the standard, most people are loathe to change because they have already learned how to type once (and that was hard enough).
In Office 12, Microsoft seems to have focused on adding pretty, bubbly crap to the suite and helping users add pretty, bubbly crap to their documents. Here are a few of the features in Office 12.
Office 12 Features
Automatic Ribbon switching based on what is selected
- This looks handy, and could prove to be useful, so long as the fundamental commands are not covered up (it appears that copy and paste are always visible).
PowerPoint upgrades
- PowerPoint features two new and interesting and useful features: Image Reflections and IGX Graphics. IGX Graphics are apparently an extremely simply way to add relevant graphs and diagrams to presentations.
Conclusion
Prettiness looks like more of a priority than consistency. I will need to experiment with the new version for awhile before I can really determine its worth.
In the meantime here is a [canned?] demonstration of some of the new features:
