That's a poor analogy, there were many very tangible benefits to the horseless carriage.
Office 2007 has no significant new features over 2003 other than a counterintuitive interface and incompatible new file formats.
As an example of how bad the interface is, in Word, if you want to add a page break, it's in the Insert tab, just like in every previous version it's been in the Insert menu. If you want to add a section break, it's in the Page Layout tab.
Office 2007 was simply a cosmetic change because Microsoft had nothing new to add in terms of functionality, but needed something new to flog to the unsuspecting. IMHO.
Microsoft Office 2010 Technical Preview
Cars let people do the same things faster. Ribbon has the same effect. The analogy is perfect, IMHO. To say it's just a cosmetic shift suggests you're unwilling to learn it, and if you're unwilling to learn it then you shouldn't be preaching about it.
Sayingt's like saying Page Setup should only ever be allowed to be in the File menu even though it's nothing to do with filing, it's clearly a formatting thing, but that's a weakness of the hierarchial menu structure and as you add more features it only gets more and more complex and nightmarish. Makes sense to have a system that adapts to the task you're doing and I find it works well, virtually anticipating what I need.
Sayingt's like saying Page Setup should only ever be allowed to be in the File menu even though it's nothing to do with filing, it's clearly a formatting thing, but that's a weakness of the hierarchial menu structure and as you add more features it only gets more and more complex and nightmarish. Makes sense to have a system that adapts to the task you're doing and I find it works well, virtually anticipating what I need.
Knight knight
The new UI is the most visible of the changes, but there are many other useful additions, including: Context checking for the spell checker, icons, bars & colour grading for values in Excel, vastly improved rendering for charts, graphs & shapes across the suite, RSS support in Outlook and themes, font & colour sets across the suite.Steve in Pudsey wrote:Office 2007 has no significant new features over 2003 other than a counterintuitive interface and incompatible new file formats.
Remember this is the team which gave us such wonderful features such as "adaptive menus" - hiding stuff you don't use very often so you can't find it when you do want it, and the "customisable UI" - so you can move, hide & delete everything, making it impossible for anyone to tell you what functions to click. There were over 30 toolbars in Word 2003, and over 50 task panes, the whole UI was collapsing under the weight of the number of functions available. Every edition has released a new idea to tidy up this collapse, most of which have then needed fixing in the next edition.Steve in Pudsey wrote:Office 2007 was simply a cosmetic change because Microsoft had nothing new to add in terms of functionality, but needed something new to flog to the unsuspecting. IMHO.
I for one welcomed the new UI, yes it takes getting used to, but overall it was a good, and brave decision to abandon the past and design a new UI which meets the requirements of a modern word processor, and makes the wide range of features discoverable. I for one have found lots of features to speed up my usage of Excel, which apparently have been there for years but didn't know they were there.
Have a read of this section "Why the UI?" on Jenson Harris' blog for a full explanation.