"I should note that this isn’t terribly radical, and in fact, it isn’t all that different from the direction Gnome and KDE have been heading." Given that he ju

"I should note that this isn’t terribly radical, and in fact, it isn’t all that different from the direction Gnome and KDE have been heading." Given that he just seems to be proposing the Vista-style Start menu (which I think is a good thing) is not that radical, no. Alan Cooper covered most of this in his book, "About Face", but Cooper noticed the important things which seem to have gone missed (well, it is Cooper's job, after all). For instance, getting rid of the menu altogether is probably a mistake. Cooper pointed out that the menu is the pedagogical interface. i.e. the way people learn how to use programs, and what programs can do, is to go through the menus and find stuff. Just by looking through menus is a good way to get a feel for what a program can and can't do (one of the reasons why you should only grey/disable menu items, and not sub-menus). The way a lot of users actually use the program once they've learned it is with toolbars, shortcut keys, direct manipulation, etc. Some people still use menus all the time, and most people will use menus for the features they don't use often. The Office ribbon is a smart evolution of the UI - you can still explore the ribbon to find out how to do stuff, but that stuff is generally more available than hidden away on a menu. Presenting people with either an empty box that they have to type a search into, or a massive pane of everything the user can do (seemingly what he suggests with his Paint reworking), doesn't seem like a great idea. By this I mean that it takes away the user's ability to learn a program as easily.