Comment by trinix912

> The ribbon is a great fit for Office style apps with their large number of buttons and options.

To me this is the exact use case where it fails. I find it way harder to parse as it's visually intense (tons of icons, buttons of various sizes, those little arrows that are sometimes in group corners...).

Office 2003 had menus that were at most 20-25 entries long with icons that were just the right size to hint what the entries are about, yet not get in the way. The ribbon in Office 2007 (Word, for example) has several tabs full of icons stretching the entire window width or even more. Mnemonics were also made impractical as they dynamically bind to the buttons of the currently visible tab instead of the actions themselves.