> You brought up Office's ribbon. Sure, it was a "look&feel benefit", but it also significantly hurt discoverability That is simply not true. In fact, the maj

> You brought up Office's ribbon. Sure, it was a "look&feel benefit", but it also significantly hurt discoverability That is simply not true. In fact, the major impetus for creating the Ribbon was the Office team dealing with the constant feature requests for features they'd already implemented, but users couldn't find how to activate/use. > and reduced the number of features available. Also untrue, unless you're going to say things like "being able to drag a menu off the menu bar and hover around like a toolbar" are a "feature". Or put another way, it did reduce configurability, but the number of actual useful features was not reduced. > Is it just a discoverability problem, or did Microsoft go with that stupid new trend of dumbing down software to the lowest common denominator? You should know I mentally translate the phrase "dumb down" to, "I don't like this because of a knee-jerk but I've never bothered to think about it long enough to express why". > The less you demand from your users, the dumber they get. Seriously? How about: the fewer obstacles you put in front of your users, the more useful work they can get done.