The problem for Office is that it is so well known and widely used. People have ingrained habits and muscle memory for Word, Excel etc.

That means that any significant change to Office has to be several magnitudes better just to be considered ok by the average (experienced) user.

Further experimentation has shown me that ribbons and dockable panels DON’T go well together at all. There is conflict about where the “master” icon for a given function should live.

Also, since one of the applications I’m working on will use a lots lists (a bit like Photoshop layers) it’s not at all clear to me how to represent those in a very horizontal space.

So the prognosis for the ribbon in at least on of the apps is not good.

What might be interesting to test is to see the core difference between people that like the Ribbon and those that don’t. It might be that the first group “looks” wider, while the second group are very specific where they look at, and if you shift things around it (cognitive friction) affects them a lot more.

It might not be that simple, but if you can lower the friction and remove any connotation with the Office Ribbon (which comes with preconceived ideas that the Ribbon doesn’t work), you might convince them. Call it a “Task Flow Menu” or something.

A question I would like to ask is how is a Ribbon different from a standard hierarchical menu? The only difference I see is that the “sub categories” are displayed horizontally (saves space) instead of vertically and that the choice for the menu’s main grouping is task driven.