The Ribbon goes to... optional?

Maybe you should have read the whole article?...

Update: Office Rocker Darren Strange says this is not a concession at all:

There has been a little flurry of rumours on the blogsphere including the ever excitable slashdot that we have radically changed the ribbon, making it much smaller. Some are saying that we are even backing away from the ribbon or that we received "complaints" that it was too big.

I've checked with the source that is Jensen and his team and this is not the case. All we can think of is that somebody got confused about the minimised ribbon feature which has been in there from the beginning. There have been some recent improvements to the way the minimised ribbon works I suppose - e.g. a sort of "autohide" so that now it will return to a minimised state after using a feature.

Ryan - the comment by Ryan is correct. I never said the ribbon UI would be optional - only that an auto-hide preference had been added. I still don't like the message this decision sends but I understand why it was made and appreciate the fact that Microsoft has to address the legitimate concerns of people who, unlike me, have had only screen shots and other people's opinions to base their reactions on.

The ribbon is a brilliant piece of work. I simply can not go back to Office 2003 and feel comfortable any longer. I get more done, more quickly in Office 2007 than in any previous version and I applaud Microsoft for having the courage to reinvent the toolbars and menus paradigm in such a fresh and interactive way.

The adoption curve will be long on this release I suspect. It took a long time for people ot appreciate the value in the refinements that were introduced in Office 2003 compared to Office XP. That was a bang-for-the-buck issue. This time around, the issue is change - big change - and frankly, a lot of people are intimidated by big changes, even when they are "good for them".

Add to that the fact that many IT people have understandable concerns about the training costs associated with this big change and you have a number of gating factors that will make for slow adoption.

I kind of wish that Visio 2007 gets updated to use the "Ribbon". And I couldn't agree any more with Marc.

Thnaks David. When I first met with some of the Office team early last year and had my first taste of the riboon, I asked specifically about Visio because it seemed like a natural for the treatment. I was told at the time that there simply weren't enough resources to add the new UI to more than the core suite in this release.

There's a huge amount of functionality remapping required to contextualize the ribbon to each application's processes and Visio is a particularly complex application. I'd love to see the ribbon applied to OneNote also but that team was adamant that the need to add features and functionality to what is, in essence, a version 2 release was more pressing for them.

About time someone points out the fact that the ribbon has been minimizable from the beginning. Since the clunky first beta, I've been double-clicking to minimize the system ribbon without even thinking about it (e.g. it felt natural in the interface), so I don't know what all the fuss is about.