The usability of Office before the Ribbon vs. the usability of Office after the Ribbon is like night and day. It was a massive overhaul, and it was for the better - the product is, IMO, far easier to understand.

It's a huge innovation, and frankly I think it's silly to discount it as a "coat of paint".

For new users, perhaps. For people that have been using office since '97, it was a huge kick in the face.

That lasts a month or two.

They don't notice they're more productive later. "Oh, it was awful." And they're doing whizzier things faster than before.

Often, people just hate change.

Strongly disagree. I am far less productive using the ribbon interface, and have been for years. I have never "gotten used to it."

Oh, come on. You seriously don't mean that. If you are you can't be using it much.

It's that hard to believe that I think one of their latest innovations sucks? I use Excel on a regular basis for simple regression analyses and data shuffling.

>>Often, people just hate change.

No, people hate sudden change. When it comes to more gradual change, such as the user interface progression from XP to Vista and then to Win 7, it is totally fine. But going from Win 7 to Win 8? Not so much. (Yes, Win 8 will have an old-style UI option, but that's not the point.)

Any interface change is a kick in the face to people who have been heavy users of the software. That does not mean that every change is for the worse.

The Ribbon interface was a massive upgrade in usability for the office division, that I'm _still_ not sure how they pulled off as well as they did - I can easily imagine 20% of that $100mm went into the Ribbon interface.

For those of us who hop between Visio, Word, Excel, Power Point - it's been a godsend. I don't know of a single users who puts more than 10 hours / week that (after a month or two of grousing over how the new was crappier than the old) - didn't consider it a major upgrade - particularly as for keyboard jockeys - the old keyboard shortcuts are still there.

The transition to the old crufty Menu Interface to the Ribbon interface, in my mind, was as big a difference for my productivity as the transition from the "Different-Menu's-per-application" of the Legacy era to the "Standard-Menu's-per-app" of the Macintosh era.

Off the top of my head:

* A new, standardized document format that's trivial for hackers to open up and play with.

* More stability across the board

* New products added (OneNote is lovely for instance)

* More stable rendering - gone are the days (for me at least) where saving, closing and re-opening a Word document had things moving around

* Much more reliable saving and document recovery

* Creating Office Live and bringing it up to date with the new Windows family (Metro interface etc) which to me is a strong indicator they're not going to drop it any time soon

And of course, if it's great and you use it and they do drop it, you can just import your documents into Google Docs or <insert competitor software here> and get on with editing them.

Which versions are you thinking of in particular? I know 2007 added OneNote, and from what I've been able to tell 2010 improved stability over 2007.

In all fairness, it's hard to improve without impetus. Madden (all sports, really) releases a new edition every year that's largely the same as the year before. Look at iOS6.

That said, some of MS's divisions could really use some turnover.

And 'small things' like this;

http://rise4fun.com/QuickCode