[Illotus]

Not really, it is much more discoverable for most people. If interested, MS UI lead has a blog about lot of the reasons for ribbon and on the research backing it https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/jensenh

[cowboylowrez]

Its probably a case of UI discoverability vs usability. Brand new users might discover better with the ribbon, but as brand new users keep using the product, they transition to experienced users, and the UI needs to adapt to that. My experience is that the ribbon doesn't. Its tolerable, and for me thats enough but I get the points about the ribbon. Its sort of like the new reddit UI, but props to reddit they at least have kept much of the old UI available for longer than I expected them to.

[hedora]

The problem with it was that it constantly moved the buttons around. So, you had to constantly rediscover it.

[hedora]

Sadly, none of the links I tried work anymore. (Though the conversation in the comments where they have to explain how to open a ppt in powerpoint is internet gold!)

I was hoping to figure out what led to design incompetence so spectacular that people would still be discussing it after 17 years.

I think there’s a clue in the abstract: The author claims they made 25,000 mock UI screenshots, but doesn’t mention user studies or even internally prototyping some of the concepts to see how they feel.