Office 2007 UI License

MikeWeller writes, "Microsoft has recently announced a new licensing program for the Office 2007 user interface. This page links to the license and an MSDN Channel9 interview about the program (featuring a lawyer). The program 'allows virtually anyone to obtain a royalty-free license to use the new Office UI in a software product. There's only one limitation: if you are building a program which directly competes with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, or Access (the Microsoft applications with the new UI), you can't obtain the royalty-free license.' What does this mean for OpenOffice? Will traditional menus/toolbars hold up to an ever-increasing number of features, or will OO be forced to take on a new UI paradigm? With the gap between OO and MS Office widening, how is this going to affect users trying to move between the two platforms?" You need to sign the license before you can get the 120-page UI implementation guidelines, which are confidential.

Comments

Fair enough

[El Lobo]

Fair enough. You want to compete? Then work your ass off...

so, what this seems to say

[yagu]

So, what this seems to say: Microsoft will allow anybody and everybody to plant their seed (the ribbon UI), to start the viral/grassroots campaign to their way of doing things. Unless and until it conflicts with their existing products.

It's royalty free... translation: Microsoft gets a free ad campaign. But for those who may not be familiar with the company Microsoft, Microsoft is not likely to be friendly about anyone using their UI on any product down the road they decide should be protected.

So are these the dying rattle breaths of a behemoth unable to compete today? Or is it one more salvo (consider Ballmer and his innuendo about Microsoft's Novell-Linux pact) in a war to control even more tightly the computing business world?

Re:so, what this seems to say

[Luscious868]

But for those who may not be familiar with the company Microsoft

Uh, this is Slashdot. Not only are most readers familiar with Microsoft, but they also hate them as much as you do.

Re:so, what this seems to say

[diersing]

If only Apple would have thought of this... I wonder what the Windows desktop would look like today.

Re:so, what this seems to say

[phase_9]

So, what this seems to say: Microsoft will allow anybody and everybody to plant their seed (the ribbon UI), to start the viral/grassroots campaign to their way of doing things. Unless and until it conflicts with their existing products.

Couldn't have said it better myself. This is Microsoft's way of trying to get a 'unique new interface' rolled out as rapidly as possible. If you're not using this 'unique new interface' then you know you're behind the time - hell, knowing Microsoft products, it also means you're probably about to be EOL'd!

"Dude, You're still using XP with those crappy flat menus.... wow..."

I genuinely hope that the public don't buy this latest round of Msft. bullsh-t, Office 2003 is still perfectly capable, why should users be forced to upgrade?

*sigh*

Re:so, what this seems to say

[CastrTroy]

I think that most reviewers had problems with the new UI because many (most?) people who use MS word have enough trouble with moving between different versions when there is very little UI change. A complete overhaul such as this would be terrible, especially when all the other applications they still use have a completely different UI. I think this is a method of getting more applications that work the same as the new MS Office, so that people start to think that it's more worth it to learn the new UI rather than just stick with the old software, or switch to OO.o, since it's more like Word 2003 is than the new MS Word. I think that MS is taking a brave stance by trying to move away from the tried and true UI, but I think that many users will have a lot of trouble learning the new interface. Remember the UI hasn't changed this drastically since the move to windows in MS Word 6(?).

Re:so, what this seems to say

[Total_Wimp]

This is not the first time MS has placed this kind of restriction. The MSDN, a large pack of software used by subscription and intended for developers, has had a similar restriction since well before 2000. It says, in a nutshell, that you can use the software to develop anything except a general purpose suite of office software.

It's kind of stupid to offer development tools and then restrict developers, especially if you're interested in convincing people that you're not using your monopoly improperly. It looks bad. But I gotta ask, why on Earth should open source developers care?

Do you want to be in Microsoft's shadow? Are you an "almost as good" substitute for MS, or are you actually better? Do you have origional ideas?

AMD didn't get where it is now by continuing to copy Intel. It got here by at some point realizing it could do better. Intel ended up following them. If you want to look, act and be just like Microsoft, then you should be upset over this. If you want to look and act like something better, then this is just a good reminder that that is your goal.

TW

Re:so, what this seems to say

[JohnQPublic]

Hey, there's no law that says you have to make your application look like MS Office. But since most applications on Windows (and many FS/OSS applications as well) try to do so, it's nice to know how, and to know that the only folks who could try to stop you from doing it won't. Cut Microsoft a break here - they deserve it in this case.

On the other hand, the strong implication in this is that Microsoft has defensible intellectual property underlying the Office 2007 UI. It wouldn't surprise me to find that there are a bunch of patents involved. So ... if you're against software patents, you should consider what approach to take. Personally, I'd avoid replicating their interface anyway.

Re:so, what this seems to say

[alexhs]

"Dude, You're still using XP with those crappy flat menus.... wow..."

... you must be a dinosaur

Re:so, what this seems to say

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that Microsoft is encouraging others to help them create an international Office UI standard that will be proprietary. It enforces the notion that much of what will be included is their property, and it creates a standardization that they own. It is grossly anti-competitive and monopolistic behavior.

Re:so, what this seems to say

[PingSpike]

I'm no so sure I'd call their stance brave. I think the word is irrational...or if we want to use several words, 'out of touch with their users'. One of the things microsoft used to do right was to enforce a standard interface for applications. But since XP came out they've been trying to change the foundation heavily for every iteration...and for no good reason that I can see! Was the old interface really that inefficient? I know when I first start up a fresh install of XP I spend a fair amount of time making it look like windows 2000, as much as can be. Because why should I have to learn a new interface for windows? Why does it now take 5 clicks to do what used to take 2? Even if we allow for the idea that maybe the drastic interface overhaul makes it genuinely easier on new users, its being done at the expense of old users and developers. Less savy old users may not be able to find that obscure task in control panel anymore, that they'd barely learned how to do in the old version. Developers constantly have the carpet pulled out from under them as Microsoft changes the rules of the game. And those coveted new users...well, they have a pretty interface. Its to bad many of the applications they use subscribe to the old one, essentially leaving them forced to learn a little bit of the old standard interface anyway. There was an article yesterday regarding office and how it was hard to get people to feel they needed the new version when the old version was 'good enough'. My thoughts on that were because office was 'done'. I just don't feel that product can benefit from signifigant changes at this point. But MS wants that upgrade cycle to continue, so they start reinventing the wheel. I said I saw no good reason for the change, but I know there's a reason. A new interface probably offers the least actual benefit to the users, but is the most noticable change. The question is, will people be amazed by the new and shiney enough to endure relearning what they already learned?

Re:so, what this seems to say

[Randolpho]

I think that MS is taking a brave stance by trying to move away from the tried and true UI, but I think that many users will have a lot of trouble learning the new interface.

I tend to agree with you on both points. Changing UIs like that is a gutsy move. Even the switch to the windows 95 OS interface didn't change much about the overall window UI from 3.x. This is a huge move.

That said, I've asked folks at MS several times at conferences about the switch, and they all give a similar answer. Their research indicates that users overwhelmingly prefer the new UI over the old menu-driven approach.

It's a gutsy move, but they're sure it'll be a welcome one.

Re:so, what this seems to say

[rvw]

I suppose the move to Windows was much more radical. Still, this is no.2. I don't know yet if I'll use it or not. Is it possible to go back to the classic menu? Like in XP you can use the Windows Classic style? It's the first thing I do after installing XP: change that ugly blue theme and go to the classic start menu, set explorer to the classic style.

Re:so, what this seems to say

[Psiren]

Do you want to be in Microsoft's shadow? Are you an "almost as good" substitute for MS, or are you actually better? Do you have origional ideas?

The problem with this is Microsoft have a huge budget and endless resources to develop these new ideas. On the flip side, while the "open source community" can probably outdo Microsoft in terms of developer numbers, there is no effectve way of mobilising that "workforce" towards a common goal. Even Sun has been unable to create a usable GUI for Openoffice. It sucks terribly in comparison with MS Office.

I'll be the first to cheer when someone comes up with a more usable interface. I won't be holding my breath though.

Don't be so quick to dismiss Microsoft's effort. They will have done a huge amount of usability testing before release. Personally I quite like the new ribbon design, and especially like the little fade-in popup when you select text. Minmize the ribbon and you have a very clear and uncluttered interface.

Re:so, what this seems to say

[Anonymous Coward]

Office 2003 is still perfectly capable, why should users be forced to upgrade?

Who is 'forcing' users to do anything? Where exactly on the Office 2003 advertising literature say that users are entitled to everlasting product support?

Users are perfectly free to chose a competing product with a longer support period if they so wish - the only blame Microsoft can be attributed here is for making such a good office suite that nobody feels the need to do this.

Re:so, what this seems to say

[squiggleslash]

Well, Apple did kind of think about it, and spent a lot of time suing Microsoft in the mid-eighties and early nineties (which was rather odd because pre-'95, Windows looked nothing like Mac OS, and even Windows 95 has significant differences.)

Different people have different takes on it. Some say Microsoft resolved the suit when it paid Apple the millions of dollars it did in the infamous Steve Jobs "Microsoft is our friend, Microsoft has always been our friend" keynote in the late nineties. Others say that Apple lost the suit, after successfully bullying companies for long enough using the suit that it didn't really matter (Digital Research is a famous example, who rewrote GEM's "Finder" equivalent to be completely un-Mac like after Apple sued, but after they'd already sold the earlier version to Atari, who continued to bundle the Mac-like version of GEM with the ST for years.)

Re:so, what this seems to say

[CastrTroy]

The UI seems to be getting worse and worse each time they make a major overhaul, because they don't go update all their existing software. So if you're running Windows XP, then there's a lot of stuff (Included in the OS) that still has the windows 98 UI, or an even older UI. I read somewhere that Windows Vista includes applications with 5 different UIs because not everything was upgraded to work with the new Vista UI, and some of it hasn't been upgraded since 3.1. The worst part isn't the fact that they changed the UI, but that they changed some of it, and now the UI isn't consistent, so new users have to learn 5 UIs and existing users have to learn yet another UI.

Re:so, what this seems to say

[ticklish2day]

Have you used Windows Vista or Office 2007? Quoting what you "read somewhere" as authorative without appropriate references is aliased as FUD. The new Office UI is definitely easier to use than the menu-based hierarchy of previous releases. It's not that Microsoft made the change on a whim - a lot of research went into it. Spend some time reading the Office UI Bible, a series of blog posts by the Office UI Lead PM and try and understand the motivation for the change.

Re:so, what this seems to say

[Magada]

Come back here to bitch and whine about Microsoft when they come to reposess their precious widget design that you foolishly used in one of your projects. It's their property, man, dig?

Re:so, what this seems to say

[operagost]

I read somewhere that Windows Vista includes applications with 5 different UIs because not everything was upgraded to work with the new Vista UI, and some of it hasn't been upgraded since 3.1.

Windows 3.1 was 16-bit. I don't think they're lazy enough to thunk their own OS tools through wowexec. I'm going to need a source for that. I mean, I read somewhere that Steve Ballmer is the mortal enemy of chairs and underarm deodorant. That sounds a lot more plausible.

Re:so, what this seems to say

[Duhavid]

If it (the office suite) is so good, then why is Microsoft afraid of competition in this area?

Re:so, what this seems to say

[dnoyeb]

It seems to me like an attempt to bake the 'windows' UI into a specific application suite. Then they will probably give this UI away for free with windows by default, but still claim its part of office?

This would seem to be an attempt to keep other office programs from using any new UI candy present in Vista. Nothing more, nothing less.

I't won't matter because when people start 'working' they are not concerned about how pretty the UI is but how well things work. MS Word for one is a terrible program performance wise.

Re:so, what this seems to say

[LinuxDon]

Quote: "Even Sun has been unable to create a usable GUI for Openoffice. It sucks terribly in comparison with MS Office."

Hold it, it depends on what you're familiar with. I for one get the strong urge to smack my head against the monitor every time I work (about two hours per year) with MS Office. However, I'm very comfortable working with OpenOffice. And having to click the arrow in MS Office everytime I want to access a menu item I haven't used in the last 2 minutes is the worst invention -ever-.

Re:so, what this seems to say

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

Perhaps they recompiled it without changing anything?

Re:so, what this seems to say

[geobeck]

...the UI hasn't changed this drastically since the move to windows in MS Word 6(?).

I remember using Word and Excel 4 in Windows, and no, the UI was not that different at all. This seems like a case of "We've got this flashy new OS, but we have no functional changes for Office... how can we justify releasing a new version?"

Kind of like when they released a tremendous overhaul of Windows NT (Windows 2000) for business, but had nothing new for home users. The result: Windows Me. If that's a valid parallel, stay as far away from Office 2007 as possible.

Re:so, what this seems to say

[Psiren]

And having to click the arrow in MS Office everytime I want to access a menu item I haven't used in the last 2 minutes is the worst invention

I'm in total agreement there. The first thing I do is turn that off. That's what options and preferences are for. My colleague however thinks it's very useful. He thinks you need to be a regular user of Office to get the "benefit" of it, and like you, I'm not.

My main grumble about OpenOffice is the godawful widget set they've created. If they switch to either Gtk or Qt it would improve usability no end. At the very least the fonts will be usable and scale in the same manner as all of my other programs.

Re:so, what this seems to say

[stubear]

"And having to click the arrow in MS Office everytime I want to access a menu item I haven't used in the last 2 minutes is the worst invention -ever-."

Then turn the damn feature off for christ's sake. For people like you who claim to be so technically adept, I find many to be as utterly fucking clueless as the people they often chide.

Re:so, what this seems to say

[NineNine]

Microsoft will allow anybody and everybody to plant their seed (the ribbon UI), to start the viral/grassroots campaign to their way of doing things

So what? It's a good thing for developers and users. I wrote a custom app for my business using VB6 to manage some middleware piece. It works fine. I needed a web browser integrated into it to do a few things. I could use IE, which involved dragging an icon into my application, or I could use Firefox which involved... actually, I have no idea how I would do that. IE has a nice simple COM object for me to use. Firefox doesn't. Thus, my app uses IE.

It's high time that OSS people get their heads out of thier asses and realize that THEY need somebody screaming about developers and throwing chairs. I love MS stuff because it all works together fairly well, and development is so fucking simple. I see being able to use pieces here and there as a good thing.
 
    The alternative is re-inventing the wheel with every stupid application, and having the end product be an absolutely incomprehensible rat's nest of stuff that doesn't have any consistency of any kind, or work together in any kind of predictable way (Linux, anybody?)

If you enjoy hacking together the same shit time and time out of sheer spite, good for you. For me, life is too short. I'll drag and drop and go onto something more interesting.

Re:so, what this seems to say

[Total_Wimp]

On the flip side, while the "open source community" can probably outdo Microsoft in terms of developer numbers, there is no effectve way of mobilising that "workforce" towards a common goal. Even Sun has been unable to create a usable GUI for Openoffice. It sucks terribly in comparison with MS Office...

...I'll be the first to cheer when someone comes up with a more usable interface. I won't be holding my breath though.

I'm not so sure it's as bad as all that. For example, look at the OOo 2.0 icons. They look great. I know an icon is barely a UI element, much less a whole UI, but you know a a regular ol' programer didn't do that. It took someone with more than a little artistic talent to pull that off.

For that matter, look at the visual elements in major Linux distros over the last few years. Visual quality and consistency have improved dramatically across the board. Some areas are still rough, but if you've ever looked at the mess that's in most Microsoft "options" menus, you know theyr'e not alone.

I have to admit that I've been lulled into looking for the next clone of an MS feature. When they put the format painter in OO.o 2 I was very pleased. But it's not the clone features that get me comming back to open source. It's the things that only those products offer.

Wasn't it tabs. popup blocking and the small footprint that got you hooked on Firefox? MS didn't have 'em. I know I like being able to have more than one true window in OO.o spreadsheet. The guys in Redmond make me use a single window.

Now microsoft is following Firefox's lead on tabs. They're actually following open source. Tabs are a UI element. Clearly OS has some ability to lead.

BTW, I agree with you. Microsoft has some very bright people who often do a great job at making thier UIs work for you. Sometimes they don't. Often, even if they do, they take their good, sweet time to get there. The OS community can bang out an improvement almost at the speed of thought, and then ramp up evolutionary improvements in short months, or even weeks. I think that if it's a priority for OS to lead, MS is going to have no choice but to follow. I also think if we simply follow, we'll never be given the opportunity to lead.

TW

Re:so, what this seems to say

[Anonymous Coward]

>> I't won't matter because when people start 'working' they are not concerned about how pretty the UI is but how well things work. MS Word for one is a terrible program performance wise.

You basically say :

1) People is concerned about performance
2) Program X is horrible performance-wise

but there is a fact

3) Program X is the most used program in the world.

this lead us to

4) ... WTF ?

but of course we're on /. so we must end the list with

5) ... profit!

Re:so, what this seems to say

[ericlondaits]

I think the web (web 2.0 particularly) threw the concept of "uniform UI" out the window. Once the average user was supposed to learn to use a small, consistent and coherent set of widgets, practices, metaphors, etc. now they are exposed to different login procedures, different password schemes, captchas (an absolute UI WTF), flash interfaces, AJAX interfaces, JAVA interfaces, standard Web forms, etc. Thanks to web apps we kissed much of the work on localization, accesibility and contextual help goodbye.

Today there are lots of inexperienced computer users who still manage to:

• Use windows.
• Use a browser.
• Use an IM client.
• Use an email client or webmail site.
• Use some social network site, like the complete UI mess that is MySpace, or blogs, photologs, etc.
• Use a p2p client

Just with that basic usage they're exposed to a ton of different widgets, metaphors and procedures Even users who call the little blue icon with the 'e' "The Internet".

So, sure... some people will feel lost at first, but I think a complete UI overhaul is much manageable now than it was before the coming of the net.

Re:so, what this seems to say

[discojohnson]

I genuinely hope that the public don't buy this latest round of Msft. bullsh-t, Office 2003 is still perfectly capable, why should users be forced to upgrade?

three letters: XML. have you ever tried to generate an excel document with charts without using an office object? can't really be done in a secure (read: won't potentially crash your IIS box) manner due to needing office installed. in an environment where reports (excel, ppt, word) are generated by a site this is priceless.

Re:so, what this seems to say

[phase_9]

Fair point, having steered my career well away from Microsoft related sysadmin'ing I had never considered such issues. Still, that's the sort of feature I would expect to see filtered into a product as a point release - fix what's broken - but then again maybe I expect everything to live off the GNU-esq. model.

Re:so, what this seems to say

[VertigoAce]

I've been using Office 2007 almost exclusively for the last six months. Every now and then I do something in Word 2003 and it is a painful transition. There are features that I started using in Word 2007 that are in older versions, but I spend five minutes trying to find each one. Most users don't have a clue about the things Word 2003 is capable of, because they are hidden in obscure menu options and dialog boxes.

The transition from 2003 to 2007 is probably an initial five minutes to look around the ribbon and see what's on each of them. In my experience, you find the vast majority of features you've ever used pretty quickly. Then you start seeing other features that you might start using (whereas you never saw them in 2003, so you never thought to start using them).

Re:so, what this seems to say

[Anonymous Coward]

This seems like a case of "We've got this flashy new OS, but we have no functional changes for Office... how can we justify releasing a new version?"

"No functional changes for Office"?

Ignorance, thy name is "geobeck".

Re:so, what this seems to say

[IAmTheDave]

I genuinely hope that the public don't buy this latest round of Msft. bullsh-t, Office 2003 is still perfectly capable, why should users be forced to upgrade?

Being someone who develops a product that is heavily integrated into Office wherever possible (because our customers demand it) I could actually see using some of these components. I know there's a lot of MS hate, but Office 2007's UI will become known - sooner or later - and riding their giant monopolistic wave to success isn't bad business.

It may make you feel dirty, I can understand it. From a business perspective, with a product that we want to be seen as made for the business professional - it's not an entirely off-the-table idea.

Re:so, what this seems to say

[I'm Don Giovanni]

What it really says is, "We spent 100's of millions of dollars on the R&D for this stuff, and don't want a competitor to copy the stuff and give it away for free".
Seems reasonable to me.

You can be sure that the new Office UI is patented up the wazoo, so MS could simply allow nobody to use it. But instead MS is still allowing anyone to use it royalty-free (including open source devs) as long as the devs that use it aren't competing with Office itself. That would be over 99.9999999% of developers. I don't write code that competes with Office and am glad to be able to use the Office 2007 UI.

Re:so, what this seems to say

[CastrTroy]

I didn't say it wasn't easier, I said it just gives us another UI to learn. It might very well be the easier to learn UI in the world, but that doesn't stop it from being yet another UI to learn. You can't just forget about the old UI's because there's still a lot of applications that use them. And about that "read somewhere" sorry for not looking up the link but here's the link, with Vista still using UI from windows 3.1

Re:so, what this seems to say

[Ragnar Bocephus]

Hell, Office 97 is still perfectly capable.

Re:so, what this seems to say

[symbolic]

Users can only *reliably and practically* choose a competing product when ALL document formats, file system formats, and other protocols that govern the storage, exchange, and transformation of their Microsoft-created documents, are freely available and complete. This simply cannot happen when patents and other roadblocks (think DMCA) exist to limit the potential for a successful, and trouble-free transition. Vendor lock-in is one of the oldest (and most effective) tricks in the book.

Re:so, what this seems to say

[Anonymous Coward]

You're obviously not a programmer. That's not an insult (well, maybe on /. it is ;) ).
  Most non-trivial software can't just be recompiled for another architecture and work, 16 > 32 had some significant changes, it would require a significant rewrite, and considering how much crap was probably in it to begin with, it'd be a real pain in the ass.

Re:so, what this seems to say

[Anonymous Coward]

That said, I've asked folks at MS several times at conferences about the switch, and they all give a similar answer. Their research indicates that users overwhelmingly prefer the new UI over the old menu-driven approach.

yeah, but there sure web developers aren't complaining about lack of css standards support and that their users are asking for more DRM and WGA, too.

i think what they are really saying is that this new interface is suggested by the pressure applied by their thmb and pointer finger when grabbing their users' noses.

at least that is what my research indicates.

Re:so, what this seems to say

[westlake]

This is Microsoft's way of trying to get a 'unique new interface' rolled out as rapidly as possible. If you're not using this 'unique new interface' then you know you're behind the time - hell, knowing Microsoft products, it also means you're probably about to be EOL'd!

that's the risk you take. but there is good money to made in software that integrates well with Office.

Re:so, what this seems to say

[gstoddart]

If it (the office suite) is so good, then why is Microsoft afraid of competition in this area?

Why face competition when you can stifle it? Saying you can make GUIs which look just like ours unless you compete with us gets their paradigm adopted but ensures they don't have to compete with another product which ahs incorporated their (ugly) GUI changes.

Re:so, what this seems to say

[MikeOttawa]

If you're using Microsoft Server 2003, or probably any other Windows OS prior to Vista, try clicking "Fonts" in the Control Panel, and then pick "Install New Font" from the menu.

Now THAT is a blast from the past. Check out the the drive drop down, and the "Newtork..." button. Must be from Windows 95 at best - maybe even Windows 3.1?

Re:so, what this seems to say

[toopc]

My colleague however thinks it's very useful. He thinks you need to be a regular user of Office to get the "benefit" of it, and like you, I'm not.

He's right to a point. It's adaptive, if you use a feature enough it'll be added to the menu. Therfore if you use Office everyday and do similar tasks everyday, eventually the menus should only have the features you use on a regular basis.

If you use Office everyday, but do completely different features everyday, then those menus won't work correctly, or they'll just eventually end up showing every feature.

I'm sure Microsoft's research showed that the vast majority of Office users do end up creating similar documents over and over again. That's unfortutnely the nature of a job. If you're lucky enough to have the kind of work where everyday you get to do something new, then bitching about having to turn off adaptive menus probably is pretty high on the list of things you have to get upset about.

Re:so, what this seems to say

[ConceptJunkie]

Just wait until your app needs something you can't do with drag-and-drop and you find out how useful all this Microsoft technology is. My experience with MS tools (15+ years) is that the application frameworks are brain-dead easy until you get outside its very narrow solution domain, then it's as hard or harder than than doing it from scratch.

Re:so, what this seems to say

[Anonymous Coward]

Because most people can't tell the difference between a good office suite, a bad office suite, and a porn popup with "Office 2008" in the titlebar.

Re:so, what this seems to say

[bhalter80]

There's a difference between welcoming competition and giving someone the recipe, blue prints, engineering drawings, etc... to your flagship product. Oracle welcomes competition from IBM and MS but their don't give away their query optimizer to them.

Re:so, what this seems to say

[Moofie]

"am glad to be able to use the Office 2007 UI."

Could you go ahead and tell me what software you work on, so I can avoid that too? Thanks.

Re:so, what this seems to say

[I'm Don Giovanni]

I said "I am glad to be able to use the Office 2007 UI", I didn't say that I would.

Re:so, what this seems to say

[justasecond]

Actually, WOWEXEC does not work on Vista, meaning 16-bit applications do not run in any form.

Re:so, what this seems to say

[NineNine]

You're right. No framework fills every need. It's just that with MS, all of the common stuff that people need to do with their software is there and simple. Sure, if I needed software to say, oh I dunno, run a car, MS doesn't have anything that'll do it. In my case, most of my own development is a fairly in-depth UI tied to a standard database that connects to a proprietary database with a simple COM object, and building flat files. That's all basic stuff that lots of people have to do lots of times every day. It's easy. It's insanely easy. If I tried doing that, say, with Java, my development time would be easily doubled or tripled.

Re:so, what this seems to say

[Duhavid]

Oh, I dont know, small thing like "doing the right thing because it is right"?

Re:so, what this seems to say

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

You're obviously not a programmer.

I'm not a Windows programmer.

Most non-trivial software can't just be recompiled for another architecture and work, 16 > 32 had some significant changes, it would require a significant rewrite, and considering how much crap was probably in it to begin with, it'd be a real pain in the ass.

Refer to the original quote:

I read somewhere that Windows Vista includes applications with 5 different UIs because not everything was upgraded to work with the new Vista UI, and some of it hasn't been upgraded since 3.1.

Windows 9x did it. I once compared progman.exe (or maybe it was calc.exe; I can't remember.) from Windows 3.1 and Windows 9x, and they had the same MD5 hash. Yes, it's messy, but it's not inconceivable that Microsoft would extend this practice to individual modules in Windows Vista.

As far as recompiling goes, it also means relinking to different libraries. It wouldn't surprise me at all if Microsoft reused some of its Win16-compatibility code in glue libraries in order to avoid having to make changes to their old application code. It would be like using wowexec, but without having to put the CPU into 16-bit mode.

Re:so, what this seems to say

[Duhavid]

You are correct, there is a difference.

I dont see how that applies here. The ability to
use the "look and feel" in a competing product is
not the recipe, the blue prints or the engineering
drawings. And the ribbon thingy is not their
flagship product, and I have a hard time seeing it
as equivilent to a database query optimizer.

Re:so, what this seems to say

[nachoboy]

The MSDN, a large pack of software used by subscription and intended for developers, has had a similar restriction since well before 2000. It says, in a nutshell, that you can use the software to develop anything except a general purpose suite of office software.

This statement is a complete and utter falsehood. MSDN is a program for software developers, but Microsoft doesn't limit the kinds of software you can produce when you purchase an MSDN subscription.

I'm willing to back up my statements though, so you don't have to take my word against anyone else's. The MSDN Master End-User License Agreement is freely available for download, or you can consult the MSDN Licensing FAQ online. I challenge you or anyone to quote the section of the license that restricts development of a "general purpose suite of office software."

On a smaller note, MSDN isn't really a program "used by subscription". You purchase MSDN licenses, which are perpetual licenses and can be used forever. Each MSDN purchase, however, also comes with a 12-month subscription whereby software updates are sent to you monthly for the next year. This helps keep you current with new releases of software. At the end of the 12 months, however, the software is still legitimately licensed to you for development and test purposes. You may continue developing software, or even sell the whole package to someone else. Of course, this is all laid out in the license linked above.

Re:so, what this seems to say

[Anonymous Coward]

Their research indicates that users overwhelmingly prefer the new UI over the old menu-driven approach.

May it be because stuffing dozens of items into each menu is not good UI design. How does it compare with =7 item menu aproaches?

Re:so, what this seems to say

[Anonymous Coward]

I really want a newtork button to go with my any key and my dwimnwis button.

Re:so, what this seems to say

[shaneh0]

This is silly. Corporate America isn't daycare.

They own IP. They are giving their IP to anyone that wants to use it. The only caveat is that you cannot use THEIR IP, that THEY DEVELOPED, and that THEY OWN, to compete with them.

This is LOGICAL to me. It's only not logical when a person is Anti Microsoft and thinks that Microsoft is somehow much worse than your average corporation.

Please. What if Apple decided to license its OS for things like, say, a DVR, but they had the restriction that you couldn't use it in a general-purpose PC. Would that be a problem?

Re:so, what this seems to say

[shaneh0]

"...the small footprint that got you hooked on Firefox?"

Are you using the same Firefox that I am?

I like the browser just fine, and I'm using it right now, but IE6 has a much smaller footprint.

Re:so, what this seems to say

[Fulcrum of Evil]

Exactly how compelling is a UI, anyway? Will people really ditch a product because it doesn't look the same as some other thing?

Re:so, what this seems to say

[drsmithy]

I dont see how that applies here. The ability to use the "look and feel" in a competing product is not the recipe, the blue prints or the engineering drawings.

Uh, yes it is. UI is probably one of the most important features of most software.

Re:so, what this seems to say

[Duhavid]

Never said Corporate America was daycare. Nor that
Microsoft is worse than the average corporation.
I am not a fan of Microsoft's, but I am not so rabidly
anti Microsoft as to say that everything they do is
aweful.

They developed a tool, and they are saying you can use
the tool as long as you dont compete with them. It is
LOGICAL to me to think that they are trying to discourage
competition. And this discouragement is based on them
fearing competition, my original argument.
Note also, that my experience is colored
by reading the license on a previous version of MSDE
that had similar "dont use this to create a competitor
to our products" clause in it.

This is really not similar to your OSX example, it is more
like black and decker saying "here is our drill, you can
use it as you like, excepting you cant use it to create
anything that will compete with our products". I have no
problem with Microsoft keeping whatever innovation private
so that they can profit from it. And they *can* do what
they are doing here, I just think it is really lame, and
I think it is proper to call them on the fact that these
kinds of things are stifling innovation.

What is next, cant use any of our compiler tools to create
things that compete? The .net runtime? Why? The only
reason I can see devolves to "because we are big and
powerfull enough to get away with it". Not from any arguement
of right and wrong.

Which brings me to the more immediate point that you responded
to, *why* is it OK to do wrong ( distinct from illegal ) in the
search of profits?

Re:so, what this seems to say

[drsmithy]

Windows 9x did it. I once compared progman.exe (or maybe it was calc.exe; I can't remember.) from Windows 3.1 and Windows 9x, and they had the same MD5 hash. Yes, it's messy, but it's not inconceivable that Microsoft would extend this practice to individual modules in Windows Vista.

64 bit Vista doesn't run Win16 stuff. I'd say it's a safe bet that anything present in both 64 and 32 bit Vista is not Win16.

Re:so, what this seems to say

[gstoddart]

They own IP. They are giving their IP to anyone that wants to use it. The only caveat is that you cannot use THEIR IP, that THEY DEVELOPED, and that THEY OWN, to compete with them.

This is LOGICAL to me. It's only not logical when a person is Anti Microsoft and thinks that Microsoft is somehow much worse than your average corporation.

In part, what you say is true. But Microsoft was the beneficiary of a court decision saying that Apple couldn't sue them for ripping off look and feel in the GUI.

Microsoft is now saying "you can copy our look and feel as long as you don't compete". In my opinion, Microsoft can't have it both ways -- either people are allowed to copy the look and feel, or they aren't. Saying that you're allowed to use our look and feel royalty free with this proviso is (seemingly) going counter to something they've stated in court -- specifically, that you can't sue someone for imitating your look and feel.

If I implement something which looks like their look and feel, but I have never seen their best-practices document, then what basis does MS have to say that I'm not allowed to do that? I would argue, none at all.

Cheers

Re:so, what this seems to say

[drsmithy]

Now THAT is a blast from the past. Check out the the drive drop down, and the "Newtork..." button. Must be from Windows 95 at best - maybe even Windows 3.1?

Definitely Windows 3.1, possibly even Windows 3.0.

The reason it's still there is explained here. Basically, because "no-one" ever uses it and the "proper" method for adding fonts is drag & drop into the Fonts folder.

Re:so, what this seems to say

[Anonymous Coward]

So what you're saying is, because Office is such a good product and everyone choses to use it, Microsoft should open their file formats.

This is laughable. Why should they? It's not Microsoft's fault that everyone uses their Office suite. Everyone uses it because it's the single best office productivity package in the world. If I chose to use some hobbled mess like OpenOffice and someone sends me a Word document that I can't open, who should I blame? Microsoft, or the person who sent me the file? Exactly what obligation are Microsoft under to leg-up their competitors? None. However I can tell you an obligation Micosoft DO have, and that is to serve the best interests of their shareholders, who probably won't want to see their investments given away for free simply because Office is so good at what it does that the F/OSS community can't compete.

Re:so, what this seems to say

[drsmithy]

I tend to agree with you on both points. Changing UIs like that is a gutsy move. Even the switch to the windows 95 OS interface didn't change much about the overall window UI from 3.x.

Yeah, it did. In particular, three massive changes were the Desktop, Start Menu and Taskbar. These are _significantly_ different UI elements to the old Program Manager and Task Manager (the Desktop has no equivalent in Windows <95).

Re:so, what this seems to say

[shaneh0]

"If I implement something which looks like their look and feel, but I have never seen their best-practices document, then what basis does MS
have to say that I'm not allowed to do that? I would argue, none at all."

And you would probably be the winner of that lawsuit.

A good example of this is when Jeep sued GM based on GM copying the grill used in the Jeep Cherokee for the Hummer H2.

Jeep lost that lawsuit. The Hummer H2 sold great. Now Jeep has an SUV that looks a LOT like a mini Hummer.

The moral of the story: A corporation doesn't concern itself with hypocrisy. It lives for one reason online: to be an engine of profit. If Microsoft using that defense against apple helped Microsoft make profit, it was the right thing for the company to do. If this caveat in their gui license helps them make profit, again, it is the right thing for the company to do.

Re:so, what this seems to say

[Nevyn]

Because swapping out a multi hundred dollar purchase for a free download doesn't take much to justify.

Re:so, what this seems to say

[Duhavid]

UI is very important, but look and feel, at least in my mind, is more
about how the various controls paint themselves, the color, the shapes,
the sizes, the fonts, how they react to being clicked on or hovered over.

How you use that stuff is the real UI, and you are right, it is important.

Things in the first category ( and that is where I put Microsoft's ribbon
thingy ) are look and feel, and are not recipe or blueprints. Things
in the second category are a part of the recipe. I would hope the code
underlying would be more important still.

Re:so, what this seems to say

[Duhavid]

Seems to me that if that were truely the case, there would
be 95% market penetration for OpenOffice.

Re:so, what this seems to say

[shaneh0]

"And this discouragement is based on them fearing competition"

Why would you say that? Wouldn't any company not want competition if they had the choice?

"it is more like black and decker saying "here is our drill, you can use it as you like, excepting you cant use it to create anything that will compete with our products"

Well, sort of. It's more like Black and Decker saying "Here, this is a FREE DRILL and you don't have to PAY ANYTHING FOR IT and you can build ANYTHING YOU WANT just as long as you don't compete with something else that we make" What's the problem with that?

"these kinds of things are stifling innovation"

Uhh... No. I disagree with you. Do you know what WOULD stifle innovation? Not being able to control your own IP. Microsoft INNOVATED here. They have invested money to create something that they feel will give them an advantage in the market place. They should (and do) have the right to say how and where their IP is used. If companies couldn't do that, you'd see a lot less innovation.

The only reason to innovate is to make money. If you remove that, innovation is useless. Nobody is writing UI elements for the betterment of mankind.

Re:so, what this seems to say

[Randolpho]

All true, but I was talking about the overall *window* UI, not the OS UI. It's nearly identical: a control button in the upper left corner (which pops a menu with options like move, minimize, maximize, and exit), a title-bar, a minimize/maximize button in the upper right, and a pull-down menu immeditately under the title bar. The only real difference between windows in Win 3.1 and windows in Win 95 and later is the addition of the 'X' button.

Re:so, what this seems to say

[Total_Wimp]

Are you talking memory and proccessor or app size? The whole FF install file is less than 6gb. It's a very focused app. although it's true that the actual iexplore.exe executible is tiny, the install executable for IE7 is 14.7gb.

Even though that doesn't seem all that much bigger, it's not counting the fact that IE is, as MS puts it, is "part of the operating system," so it has very much of it's executable content spread out throughout the system. Earlier versions of IE that were standalone were actually 20gb or more, and thats in the days when the funtionality was much reduced from what it is today. My guess (and it really is just a guess) would be that a stand-alone IE7 would go well over 30gb if not closer to 50gb.

Memory and processor usage is actually the exact same issue. Since MS is putting a lot of IE functionality in all sorts of place other than iexplore.exe, the memory and processor footprint of the executable doesn't tell the whole story. Truth is, I don't know exactly which processes are involved, my guess would be at least "system", but I know that iexplore can not be directly compared to firefox.exe for these metrics.

TW

Re:so, what this seems to say

[Duhavid]

"Wouldn't any company not want competition if they had the choice?"

They do seem to want that. It is not right, especially with several monopoly
consent decrees under their belt, to be actively pursuing this line.

"Here, this is a FREE DRILL and you don't have to PAY ANYTHING FOR IT and you can build ANYTHING YOU WANT just as long as you don't compete with something else that we make" What's the problem with that?"

True, it is free, the problem with it is that it is monopolistic.

"Uhh... No. I disagree with you. Do you know what WOULD stifle innovation? Not being able to control your own IP. Microsoft INNOVATED here."

If the control is so innovative, then why are they giving it away free to some?
According to what you wrote, seems like they should hold this closer. And how can
you say it doenst stifle innovation? If you want to innovate in the office arena,
you will not be able to make something that looks like people expect, and have
more innovative underpinnings. I'd call that stifling.

Also, I think there is a middle ground between the absolute IP viewpoint and the
no IP viewpoint. I dont agree that money is the only reason for innovation. It
is one ( very good ) reason amoung many. Innovation happened before money. Heck
money was an innovation.

Re:so, what this seems to say

[Total_Wimp]

I don't know about the version you're quoting, but how about these?

5.2 MSDN Library--Additional Rights and Restrictions.
a. Documentation. For the Library, Microsoft grants you a worldwide, nonexclusive, nontransferable, royalty-free right to make, use, and install an unlimited number of copies of the Library solely for internal use by an unlimited number of end users so long as: (i) such end users are persons who are generally granted access to your internal network; (ii) such copies shall be used only for internal purposes and are not to be republished or distributed (either in hard copy or electronic form) beyond your premises; and: (iii) you may use documentation identified in the Library as the file format specification for Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Access, and/or Microsoft PowerPoint ("File Format Documentation") solely in connection with your development of software product(s) that operate in conjunction with Windows, Windows NT, or Windows 2000 that are not general-purpose word-processing, spreadsheet, database management, or presentation graphics software products or an integrated work or product suite whose components include one or more general-purpose word-processing, spreadsheet, or database management software products.

Note: A product that includes limited word-processing, spreadsheet, database, or presentation graphics components along with other components that provide significant and primary value, such as an accounting product with limited spreadsheet capability, is not considered to be a "general-purpose" product. For licensing terms relating to use of the File Format Documentation for purposes other than the use described above, please contact Microsoft Corporation.

and how about some of this?

3.3 Additional Distribution Requirements and License Rights and Limitations - Software-Specific.
3.3.1 Microsoft SQL Server Desktop Engine ("MSDE"). If you redistribute MSDE
you agree to comply with the following additional requirements: (a) Licensee
Software shall not substantially duplicate the capabilities of Microsoft Access or, in
the reasonable opinion of Microsoft, compete with same; and (b) unless Licensee
Software requires your customers to license Microsoft Access in order to operate,
you shall not reproduce or use MSDE for commercial distribution in conjunction with
a general purpose word processing, spreadsheet or database management software
product, or an integrated work or product suite whose components include a general
purpose word processing, spreadsheet, or database management software product
except for the exclusive use of importing data to the various formats supported by
Microsoft Access. A product that includes limited word processing, spreadsheet or
database components along with other components which provide significant and
primary value, such as an accounting product with limited spreadsheet capability, is
not considered to be a "general purpose" product.

I don't know if there are more out there in this general vein or not. It could just be different versions. Also, this is more limited than I remember. There may still be a version out there that's spot on. However, as you can see, my comment was not a complete and utter falsehood. Not all of the details were correct, but the general idea that MS has restricted use of its MSDN to support production of software that would compete with Office is absolutely correct.

Note: none of my sources were really authoritative. It was from the websites of a couple of universities. Do a search for "general-purpose" and MSDN and you'll find what you're looking for.

Thanks,
TW

Re:so, what this seems to say

[WWWWolf]

64 bit Vista doesn't run Win16 stuff.

Awwwww! I so wished we could have seen more Sick Windows Tricks. Oh well...

Re:so, what this seems to say

[KarmaMB84]

The sections you highlight are in relation to documentation provided for the Office file formats via MSDN and the MSDE database engine. They are not applicable to the entire MSDN.

Re:so, what this seems to say

[nachoboy]

Note: none of my sources were really authoritative.

Then they don't really matter much, do they?

It was from the websites of a couple of universities. Do a search for "general-purpose" and MSDN and you'll find what you're looking for.

Rather than a bunch of hand-wavy "Microsoft is bad because they restrict what you can do - just go search for it", how about providing actual evidence, with attributed sources? I don't even know where you pulled those license snippets from, since you didn't provide attribution. I linked you to the official master license for MSDN, which is both current and overrides any product-specific EULA's included in the overall MSDN subscription.

The section you quoted above "MSDN Library--Additional Rights and Restrictions" clearly applies only to "documentation identified in the Library as the file format specification for Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Access, and/or Microsoft PowerPoint". It certainly doesn't restrict the types of software you can create with your MSDN subscription to the extent you asserted in your original post.

The second section is even less relevant. It says you can't redistribute MSDE (Microsoft's database engine) with word processing/spreadsheet/database programs that you write. Fine. Write your own database engine and use it however you'd like. They're still not telling you what you can do with your MSDN subscription.

Furthermore, neither clause you mentioned is present in the current MSDN Eula, giving them no weight to current MSDN subscribers. I stand by my original claim: that your original statement is false. Microsoft does not restrict the type of software you can create with your MSDN subscription. I suggest you either qualify your statements to the extent they are true or retract them completely.

Re:so, what this seems to say

[symbolic]

That's not what I'm saying at all. In fact, I'm saying the exact opposite. I'm saying that whether Microsoft is good, bad, or somewhere in between, the fact is that it has a monopoly on the market. This monopoly exists for several reasons, but one of the driving forces is that the penetration is so great that it's not feasible to use any competing (and potentially incompatible) products. One significant barrier to the adoption of alternatives is this very issue of compatibility. Where a consumer's *own data* is concerned, it should be ILLEGAL for a company to prevent or obstruct access by competing products.

Re:so, what this seems to say

[Douglas Goodall]

People have already started to notice, with the release of IE7 that the CUA compliant menu bar has vanished. When Microsoft was busy stealing Apple's look and feel, they joined the CUA camp because, "it made the users more comfortable to see a standard gui with a file menu, file/exit...". Now that they have assimulated the look and feel, i guess they no longer care about how comfortable the user is because their new programs have completely different UIs and we all get to start over learning how to use the programs. I spent some time in the new office trying to find the file save equivelent. I don't like the IE7 for the same reason. I knew where the controls were before, now I guess they want us to all go buy books and trainaing so we can use their expensive new software that is no longer intuitive to use. I say, who needs all this new stuff, when they never properly fixed the old stuff? Vista included. Not me.

Re:so, what this seems to say

[Total_Wimp]

http://www.informatik.fh-wiesbaden.de/~gelling/msd naa/eula.pdf

http://msdnaa.oit.umass.edu/Neula.asp

No, they're not straight from MS. If you know of some special place that has exact, historical copies of every MS EULA then great, you show me. But absent of that, I have to do the best I can. These may not be signed by Bill himself, but for the purpose I'm using them for they're plenty accurate enough. If you really feel someone doctored these up to make MS look bad then, well, it's your conspiracy theory life.

Secondly, both of the clauses offer additional restrictions to the use of MSDN products for the development of Office software that does not exist for any other type of software. That is the exact nature of the original article, even if it is not the exact same restriction. This, my friend, is called relevancy.

Thirdly, I freely admitted in my second post that I may have gotten some of the details wrong in my first post. You waving your hands and saying, "your first post was wrong!" and "qualify your statements!" a second time is quite redundant. But I was not completely and utterly wrong. I was simply wrong about timeframe and the scope. MS most certainly did place some types of restrictions on developing Office products that was not placed on any other software developed by users of the MSDN. They absolutely did this at some point, even if they don't do it now.

Lastly, get a grip. I was big enough to admit that I was part wrong; what makes you so stubborn you can't admit the same? You are part wrong, at least in as far as claiming that no restrictions of this nature have existed, and especially in saying that there was no veracity to my claim. I can respect the fact that you want to get at the truth, and you succeeded to a great degree. But I can only hope that you respect the fact that I'm trying to do the same, including quite a large amount of success. Life is imperfect, and in that vein I'm quite satisfied with pretty much everything I've posted in this thread.

TW

Re:so, what this seems to say

[rastos1]

I think the web (web 2.0 particularly) threw the concept of "uniform UI" out the window. Once the average user was supposed to learn to use a small, consistent and coherent set of widgets, practices, metaphors, etc. now they are exposed to different login procedures, different password schemes, captchas (an absolute UI WTF), flash interfaces, AJAX interfaces, JAVA interfaces, standard Web forms, etc.

Just for fun I tried once to write a text book for high school on subject Informatics i.e. the classes for "coping with computers". I thought that instead to explaining how to change font to bold by clicking menu Format->Character in MS Word (what usually current textbooks do) I'd explain concepts: what are the common widgets, how they behave and what they are used for. Dialog windows, frame windows, check boxes, radio buttons, combo boxes, menus, tabs, scroll bars ... Then I saw beta of new MS Office. I could not find File->Open for 5 minutes. Diverging from using standard widgets will make it difficult to switch products. Even if they are from the same vendor. I can't image how this will be taught at schools.

Re:so, what this seems to say

[ericlondaits]

I wouldn't explain the menu usage to change a font, nor the general use of menus... I'd teach about fonts instead, what they are and how you can change them. Then I'd explain that you can count on any program to let you change font type and size in a mostly straightforward manner which should be easy to find.

An expert user can find out how to change fonts without knowing where the functionality is, and even if you give him a unique GUI... but because he knows it's there and that it's not far away, and that it has to do with text formatting so it's probably somewhere close to the "Bold" and "Italics" option, etc.

Just the other day I told a friend about the "Fill Down" option in Excel, and she was thrilled because she didn't know it... not because it's hard to find, but because she didn't know it was a basic functionality of a spreadsheet. When she needs "Fill Right" (which I didn't tell her about) she'll probably find it quite easily. On the other hand, Google Spreadsheet doesn't have a visibile "Fill Down" option anywhere... but I was counting on it existing (to me it wouldn't make sense to use a spreadsheet without it) so I blindly tried CTRL+D an indeed it worked.

Morale: People will search everywhere for the functionality they know exists, but won't click on the unknown button that's sitting right in front of them without good reason.

Re:so, what this seems to say

[CastrTroy]

I wrote (6?) because I was unsure of which version of office was the first windows version. I guess it was 4 from your comment. The move from dos-based non-windows office suites was a big change. Probably the only thing that competes with the move to office 12, with the new ribbon interface.

Re:so, what this seems to say

[Chuq]

The whole FF install file is less than 6gb.

I would hope so ...

Re:so, what this seems to say

[amilham]

Are you talking memory and proccessor or app size? The whole FF install file is less than 6gb. It's a very focused app. although it's true that the actual iexplore.exe executible is tiny, the install executable for IE7 is 14.7gb.Boy, I think there would be some major problems if the install executable for IE7 was 14.7gb!

Re:so, what this seems to say

[Allador]

"Memory and processor usage is actually the exact same issue. Since MS is putting a lot of IE functionality in all sorts of place other than iexplore.exe, the memory and processor footprint of the executable doesn't tell the whole story. Truth is, I don't know exactly which processes are involved, my guess would be at least "system", but I know that iexplore can not be directly compared to firefox.exe for these metrics."

Thats not really how it works. Although its true that IE uses various other libraries that are generally available in the system, they're just that: libraries, not other services.

So when IExplore.exe consumes one of the various .dll's, they are loaded into the IExplore.exe process space, and so will show up there.

It wont, in general, call out to other existing processes/services to have the work done for it, it'll just load the dll's inside its own process space to do the work.

Re:so, what this seems to say

[shaneh0]

"If you want to innovate in the office arena, you will not be able to make something that looks like people expect"

I find it unlikely that you wrote that with a straight-face. It must be humor you're going after.

I could write an essay on how many wrong things are in this one sentence alone. For example

1) If you want to INNOVATE in the office arena, you shouldn't start by COPYING MICROSOFT. Anyone concerned with actually *innovating* wouldn't be using the Microsoft GUI controls.

2) Nobody in the world is EXPECTING a ribbon. In fact, many /.ers think this ribbon idea is not a good one. I disagree, but I do admit that this isn't a given. A lot of people will wonder where their menus went after they install this software.

3) Your entire point is "Microsoft is putting restrictions on what they are giving away for free." Give me a break! They're GIVING IT AWAY!

Here's a good analogy: The General Public License. What if I wanted to download GPL software, make a couple changes, keep the hybrid codebase proprietary, and sell the software commercially. This would be a violation of the GPL and a no-no in the eyes of the OS community. The reason is simple: In exchange for my FREE USAGE of VALUABLE IP, I have to respect the copyrights of the owner. If the copyright puts restrictions on the usage, it's fair game. It's the price you pay in exchange for using the software.

I'm getting a slight hint that you might not be a native english speaker. I mean, your writing is very good, and whether I'm right or wrong that's not the issue. The point I'm making is that there's a saying in English that you may not have heard of: There's no such thing as a free lunch.

Re:so, what this seems to say

[ConceptJunkie]

Well, don't consider Java as your only example. I'd attack that kind of project with good old Visual C++ (i.e., MFC, but only for the GUI) with my class libraries and I would be just as productive. I'd just need a couple weeks to beef up some classes, since I haven't done much of that kind of stuff lately.

And if I had a couple months to finish my class library, I'd ditch all of MFC and be just as, if not more productive.

Java? Yeah, if you're a government bureaucrat you'd feel right at home. A usable language completely shackled in a class libraries and development environments that would choke a whale.

Re:so, what this seems to say

[Duhavid]

No, I was not going after humor, and I am a native speaker of
English.

A better analogy: if you use our free GPL code, here is a list of
restrictions on what you can develop.

I have heard the "there's no such thing as a free lunch" idea before,
and there is a lot of truth there.

Microsoft is putting restriction on something they are giving away.
Fine and good. I believe my original argument was that the restrictions
indicate fear of competing products.

Ingenuity

[G3ckoG33k]

Ingenuity is Microsoft's best friend when it comes to fight GPL-licenced products. We are seeing the beginning of that.

Re:Ingenuity

[Anonymous Coward]

We haven't seen the beginning. What we *are* seeing is Microsoft acknowledging that they can't buy the creative ingenuity anymore. When they were young and exploding, minting millionaires by the minute, then they could. Now that they grow a more traditional rate fewer creative folks are willing to whore themselves as part of the hive.

Re:Ingenuity

[Josh Lindenmuth]

I don't know if I'd say this is the "beginning". Microsoft has been investing Billions in research and design for years, the new Office UI is simply an extension of that. They've also been allowing developers to use their UI components for years, the only difference here is that developers will not be able to use those UI components for a product that replicates the functionality within Excel, Word, Access, or PowerPoint.

For developers creating Windows products, this is a great license to obtain. I really don't see much of an impact on OpenOffice, as it doesn't even attempt to place any restrictions on what competitors can do, it just states that competitors can't use their Ribbon interface. Since OpenOffice is cross-platform, its developers would probably never choose to use the MS Interface outright, but likely develop their own similar Ribbon interface (if it was even worth porting, which is debatable), since it would be more compatible accross platforms and limit legal liability.

Microsoft will always spend Billions on creating slicker and easier to use interfaces. This has almost zero impact on Linux's server market (and advantages), which is why Linux has made such market share inroads on the server side. The impact is greatest though on the Desktop, where ease of use, ease of installation, and UI friendliness are far more important (and these are areas that are given a relatively lower priority by the programmers than by the Microsoft Marketing and Strategy departments).

Re:Ingenuity

[weave]

Microsoft has been investing Billions in research and design for years

One word. Zune

Re:Ingenuity

[Shawn is an Asshole]

It would be really nice if OpenOffice imitated the UI of Office 2004 for OS X or Abiword for OS X. It's very good. Here's a screen shot.

It would also rock if they dropped the current UI toolkit and switched to wxWidgets or QT. Then it would finally feel responsive and look native. Same for Mozilla.

Re:Ingenuity

[oohshiny]

Microsoft has been investing Billions in research and design for years, the new Office UI is simply an extension of that.

If the Office 2007 the result of spending "billions in research and design", Microsoft's R&D isn't paying off. The Office UI is not innovative; those ideas have been around for a while, and many applications already use them.

Microsoft will always spend Billions on creating slicker and easier to use interfaces.

I think it's highly debatable whether the new Office UI is "easier to use", and Microsoft has provided zero evidence that it is.

Office 2007 is a great opportunity for FOSS to make real advances in UI design, after Microsoft dropped the ball so badly with their next generation products.

I think the courts have made it pretty clear

[Colin Smith]

You can copy any UI that you want to.

This is just a clear threat to competitors that they're going to be spending millions defending frivolous law suits. Interesting that Microsoft have decided that their business model is now to sue competitors.

Re:I think the courts have made it pretty clear

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I agree, this is a fucking joke. MS are not giving away an implementation of the UI. Just the "right" to copy it. Well ffs Microsoft, you copied the entire Windows UI from Xerox. As the OP says, anyone can copy your UI. In fact there's a ribbon bar in at least one commercial UI Windows toolbox I know of - what are MS trying to say to that company?

Basically what this says is, IF you download the document, you CAN'T implement the UI unless MS sign off on your implementation. But if you ignore this propagandist nonsense, you can implement any UI you like including a poorly implemented version of the Ribbon UI.

Jeez. Wake me up when it's in the Win32 API.

Re:I think the courts have made it pretty clear

[LiquidCoooled]

I don't think this is about copying the UI elements.
Its about USING the microsoft provided controls inside your programs.

There were similar restrictions (if I remember rightly) regarding using original MS Access to build a database management program.

Re:I think the courts have made it pretty clear

[Otter]

You can copy any UI that you want to.

This isn't about (AFAICT, and I'm not clicking through their legal stuff from work) "copying", it's about the licensing terms for their library. Which, for the benefit of the "dying rattle breaths of a behemoth unable to compete today" guy, are the same terms they've always used.

Re:I think the courts have made it pretty clear

[Colin Smith]

Nope, nothing to do with the library. It's the User Interface they're licensing.

From the announcement:

"For those that want to build their own UI that takes advantage of our design guidelines, they will need a license."

Re:I think the courts have made it pretty clear

[Colin Smith]

Ain't what it says in the announcement: "For those that want to build their own UI that takes advantage of our design guidelines, they will need a license."

Re:I think the courts have made it pretty clear

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

That's interesting legal advice. I'm pretty sure the courts in every major jurisdiction where this has come up have clearly disagreed.

Re:I think the courts have made it pretty clear

[Anonymous Coward]

Well said, sir.

If there was an implementation you could use, a license would be meaningful. But there isn't. It's basically saying that if you want to copy the look and feel, come to us and we'll sign you up with that "right" in return for which you agree to 120 pages of finicky requirements. It's a trap. Once you sign you have to follow the requirements - and that's going to bury any real-life UI project in about 30 seconds.

Re:I think the courts have made it pretty clear

[AnotherBrian]

It sounds like they are licensing a template. If you want there's, then accept the license or make your own. They can't stop you from making a copy your self. This seems like the same thing as the license for wxWidgets or some other GUI library.

Re:I think the courts have made it pretty clear

[Anonymous Coward]

No, not anyone can copy your UI. UIs are patentable, and a great many patents have been issued by USPTO for software user interfaces. These are called design patents specifically because they specifically refer to the non-obvious visual elements of the software. Office makes use of a new paradigm. Whether or not you like it it is the result of a great deal of investment in focus groups and user interaction studies. Microsoft spent money to develop the paradigm and stands to benefit from their investment.

What Microsoft has done here is offer to component vendors the right to build third-party components to mimic the behavior in it's entirity. It is correct that Microsoft is not giving out any code, but to these vendors that isn't material anyway as they all have functional prototypes if not products at this stage. Microsoft has "blessed" them to release their implementations and given them access to the usability information they determined during their testing phases as well as the explicit behaviors that the Office implementation adopts.

Re:I think the courts have made it pretty clear

[TheRaven64]

The courts have ruled on copying existing UIs. If someone took a copy of Office 2007, examined the UI, and developed something compatible, this would be legal. The non-compete clause is in the license for the document containing the human interface guidelines, and basically says 'if you're going to compete with us, don't expect our help.' It seems like it has the potential to land them in hot water from an antitrust perspective, but it should be enforceable under contract law.

Re:I think the courts have made it pretty clear

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

It seems like it has the potential to land them in hot water from an antitrust perspective, but it should be enforceable under contract law.

Perhaps it is, but surely that applies only if another party has entered into that contract. AFAICS, there is nothing to stop anyone from just observing what Microsoft applications do, and coding a user interface that works similarly without the help of MS's guidelines.

Re:I think the courts have made it pretty clear

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Well ffs Microsoft, you copied the entire Windows UI from Xerox.

From what I understand, that's a gross oversimplification. Apple bought the rights from Xerox, and Microsoft got the rights to use the UI when Apple wanted an extension of BASIC for the Apple II. This is according to Woz's interview on the NPR Science Friday show.

Re:I think the courts have made it pretty clear

[oohshiny]

... and the intellectual property law that backs this demand is what exactly?

Re:I think the courts have made it pretty clear

[KarmaMB84]

Ask the US Patent Office. I'm sure there's a ton of patents (valid or not) winding their way through the patent process for the Office 2007 and Windows Vista interfaces.

Re:I think the courts have made it pretty clear

[oohshiny]

I'm sure there's a ton of patents (valid or not) winding their way through the patent process for the Office 2007 and Windows Vista interfaces.

Well, both tabbed toolbars ("ribbons") and galleries have plenty of prior art, so if those patents actually matter, they will be invalidated. Except for the specific visual style, OpenOffice, in fact, already has the functionality in several places.

Getting rid of the main menu bar is such an incredibly stupid idea that it's hard to understand what Microsoft could possibly be thinking. The menu bar gives you an enormous amount of bang-for-the-buck in terms of user interface.

The Gap

[lseltzer]

>>With the gap between OO and MS Office widening...

Well this is an interesting statement full of subjective possibility. I could probably argue a half dozen different interpretations.

Re:The Gap

[El_Oscuro]

I just cut and pasted parts of serveral webpages into OO, including tables, frames, graphics, etc. Just tried it, knew it wouldn't work right, because it has never worked right in MS Office. It worked perfectly in OO, all graphics, the page layout, everything... just with Control-C/Control-V. Then I saved it as a PDF file. I guess there is a gap...

I... don't understand.

[brennanw]

But I better learn quick, because this screams PLEASE GOD, PLEASE SOMEBODY PARODY ME, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE and by GOD I will ANSWER THAT CALL.

The myth of Windows GUI consistency.

[Anonymous Coward]

One thing that those who dislike the X Window System often suggest is that it lacks consistency. They say that the GUI styles change too much between different applications, and then they suggest that Windows offers a much more consistent GUI. Of course, we can see this is quite a false assertion to be making!

Windows has just as little GUI consistency as X. This new Office interface totally deviates from anything they've done in the past. The IE7 interface is completely different, as well. It used to just be that it was certain apps, like iTunes and WinAmp, that used their own stylings. But with Microsoft's new GUIs, user interface consistency has become a thing of the past on Windows.

I wonder if we'll still hear such Windows advocates use the point that most Windows applications tend to use a consistent interface style. If they do, we can surely shoot their sorry asses down. As it stands, the only platform offering consistent UIs is Mac OS X. Otherwise, Windows has become just as much of a hodge-podge of different appearances and UI layouts as a typical X installation.

Re:The myth of Windows GUI consistency.

[_the_bascule]

In your post you mention X windows consistency ... what do you mean by that exactly, there is the old technicality that X is not a Desktop Enviroment, more a GUI frame work. I use KDE and I can assure you that all K* apps are fantastically consistent in there design...

Re:The myth of Windows GUI consistency.

[maxwell demon]

Indeed, with more applications moving to Gnome or KDE, I guess on Linux the problem will lessen over time. Moreover, the high configurability of the Linux GUIs means that distributions can make the UIs of both quite similar in the distribution's default configurations.

Thus maybe at some time we get to a situation where Linux interfaces are actually more consistent than Windows interfaces!

Re:The myth of Windows GUI consistency.

[ardor]

Well, obviously, X has *NO* consistency because it has no standard widgets. Windows has. WINAPI contains buttons, sliders, scrollbars, text edits, menus etc. So the *base* for consistency is there, which cannot be said for X.

But MS violate their own standards by creating custom widgets for Office and IE. This is something widely criticized by UI designers.

However, usually the WinAPI widgets are the core of Windows GUIs (tweaked buttons, menus ...) Very little programs create their own widgets from the ground up. In X, Qt does everything from scratch, just like GTK, FOX, Athena, Motif, etc. The important thing is that their behaviour is not fully consistent. Aside from funny Office/IE widgets, I can reuse my knowledge with one Windows GUI when using another. Most Windows apps do NOT use custom widgets.

However, nowadays GTK and Qt have little custom quirks of this sort. Their differences are mostly optical (but it is a visual inconsistency when 90% of all apps are Qt/KDE-based and only one program uses GTK). However, the presence of two major TKs is a problem because distros tend to choose only one of these two. In this case you end up with a dependency that may be big enough to turn users and more importantly distro makers away (like "oh no, my system is purely GTK-based, I dont want Qt anywhere").

Re:The myth of Windows GUI consistency.

[bsdluvr]

You should try QtCurve. It has a Qt and a GTK2 theme, and renders almost 100% identical on both. It's highly configurable too, and can be made to look quite nice.

There's even a GTK1 theme, but the author dropped support for it a few versions back.

Re:The myth of Windows GUI consistency.

[Anonymous Coward]

Most Windows apps do not use custom widgets? Rubbish. You'd be hard pressed to find any Windows app made in the last decade that doesn't use custom widgets.

Why? The Win32 API's widgets are pathetic. Basically, they do slightly more than Windows 3.1's widgets did, and nothing more.

At the very least, most Windows programs implement their own menus, toolbars, buttons, tab boxes, scrolling panes, status bars, text input areas, and often a huge list of weird custom widgets that no other program uses (like the URL box in most web browsers, or even simple things like a directory listing). The default widgets are unusable, and hideously ugly. About the only widgets that are used without major modification are checkboxes, radio buttons, and scroll bars (the parts that don't do anything).

Windows can't even manage a consistent text editor field. Standard editing shortcuts (like Ctrl+Backspace, or Ctrl+Del), or even standard features like the insert toggle, cut and paste and undo are not implemented consistently across applications, or even within one application.

There is basically no consistency. The only case where you get ANY consistency is where developers imitate the latest Microsoft GUI.

At least in X GUIs, the base toolkits (commonly Qt and GTK) provide a rich set of powerful widgets, almost completely negating the need for a developer to ever feel tempted to write their own.

Re:The myth of Windows GUI consistency.

[TheRaven64]

Any competent HCI person will tell you that this is a bad idea. GTK and Qt applications do not behave quite the same way, and by making them look the same way you remove a visual clue from the user that they are going to be different.

Re:The myth of Windows GUI consistency.

[Ant P.]

Yeah, X has no consistency whatsoever. The GTK-Qt theme doesn't exist.

How about you show me a way to have MS Word, IE7, MS Antispyware, the Add/Remove Programs panel and the rest of windows all LOOK THE FUCKING SAME.

Re:The myth of Windows GUI consistency.

[pato101]

The GTK-Qt theme doesn't exist.
Do not forget the qt-curve theme, as well. It exists for both Qt and GTK (the GUI config is at the KDE control panel side) and I can ensure that the look is exactly the same for GTK and QT apps (the widget look is the same and diferences are only at file, print, and so on dialogs). The GTK-QT theme has some rendering kirks that have make me avoid it.

Re:The myth of Windows GUI consistency.

[bsdluvr]

It works well enough for me. QtCurve even tries to get rid of some basic UI differences.

I'm really no HCI expert, but I've seen some non-geek users use GTK and QT apps simultaneously with QtCurve installed, without any problems related to the differences between the toolkits. The UI design differs enough to give that "clue", while a consistent widget style creates some sort of uniformity on a different level.

Anyway: Your desktop, your choice :)

Re:The myth of Windows GUI consistency.

[ardor]

How about actually READING what I wrote? I *said* that MS violate their own standards by using custom widgets in IE and others. So much for your "argument".

As for GTK-Qt, as another poster pointed out, it has its quirks. It also requires Qt, which may be a problem for some. Oh, and X still has no consistency because X has no widgets. You are mixing bananas and apples here. Learn to differentiate.

*Sigh*

Re:The myth of Windows GUI consistency.

[ardor]

Hmm lets see.

-Any VB6 app.
-Any .NET app.
-Many small tools usually written with WinAPI directly, or with MFC.
-In this regard, any MFC app.
-Any wxWidgets based app (minus some custom wxWidget ones).
-Any Qt based app (minus some custom Qt ones).

Most apps use the common dialog widgets, which belong to WinAPI. The core WinAPI widgets are unusable of course, but most apps I know of use the SAME filerequester, menus, treeviews/listviews, editor widget, IP editing widget, scrollbars, richtext editing field, tabwidgets, comboboxes, groupboxes, radio/check buttons, toolbars, sliders.... because the common dialog DLL has ALL of these. It exists since Windows 95. What it doesn't have is automatic layouting like Qt and GTK do. Its really just a bunch of widgets.

Implementing custom widgets is just damn easy in Windows, because the basic ones (also the common dialog ones) are so easy to tweak. This is actually a BAD thing, since in most cases people the custom widgets are UNNECESSARY. Most "tweaks" are about fancy looks (most of the time ending up as ugly widgets), extra functionality (confusing users), or some weird stuff thats just downright silly (for example, real-world metaphors commonly seen in media players with the volume knob).

There are some cases where you absolutely NEED tweaks. These include apps for very special operations (like controlling some machinery or doing CAT scans), or fields where custom interfaces are usual (like in media players or modeling packages).

Oh, and custom widgets are almost always tweaked WinAPI ones. It just doesn't pay off to write it from scratch.

Re:The myth of Windows GUI consistency.

[Ant P.]

That's about as valid as saying user32.dll has no consistency because it has no widgets.

Re:The myth of Windows GUI consistency.

[ardor]

And thats right. It has no widgets, no GUI functionality AT ALL, so of course it CANNOT have any consistency.
X does not care about widgets. X just handles graphics output. It is the layer BELOW the widgets.
Why is this extremely simple fact so goddamn hard to understand?

Re:Ha-ha!

[MartinJW]

Well, every reviewer condemned the UI changes M$ did for the new office suite.

Did they? I seem to recall that the majority of reviews (I have read) actually thought the ribbon was a bad idea, until they tried it - at which point they thought it a great enhancement in managing the function bloat.

So what?

[eighty4]

What does this mean for OpenOffice?

Of course I didn't RTFA, but considering that OO.o is a) multiplatform, b) open source, and c) doing fine as it is, I'd imagine the folks at OO.o will be filing this under D for Don't Give A Shit.

Seriously - would you lose any sleep because MS won't give you a new toy? Even if OO.o wanted it, and even if MS gave them it, they probably couldn't use it because it'll probably be Vista- (or at least Windows-)only.

And seeing as most critics have slammed the new MS Office UI as being generally awful, it's not beyond the realms of possibility that OO.o's similarity to the "old" MS Office UI might pick them up a few users.

C

Re:So what?

[xtracto]

Well, I kind of agree.

I agree from the perspective that I am sure nobody will *rush* to implement the new interface design on its products. I was pissed off when I downloaded the new Messenger from microsoft which had the menu bar hidden (you could enable it but meh!).

Also, just 2 days ago a flatmate who is VERY computer illiterate asked me to help her making Adobe documents appear in the Firefox Window. I was surprised she said "Firefox Window" and as she explained me she downloaded firefox because after accepting the upgrade of Interet Explorer a lot of things where broken (this is translated to, the UI got SO different on IE7... and Firefox had a very similar UI to IE6).

I fixed that by reinstalling Adobe Reader. Then she asked me for something (unfortunately I dont know how to achieve that). The problem she had is that on IE6 she had a Word icon (I remember that) which, when you pressed, the page she was looking at was "opened" in Word. I told she could do the same by Selecting all then copy and then paste in Word, but certainly she was right telling me that it was easier (her word was "better") before as she just had to click once. I don't know if this functionality is available in firefox, as I myself have tried to COPY+PASTE a page from Fx to Word and it only copies as text not as HTML. As IE7 I could not help her adding the Word button.

Anyway, returning to the Office matter, looking at my previous experience, I am sure a lot of people will feel similarly with the new office UI. I was discussing with a friend about the Linux vs Windows issue, this friend is computer illiterate and she knows Linux because some geek tried to push it into her work and they tried to teach them how to use it. She told me that, the problem is we are SO FAMILIAR with the current ways to do things (Windows XP) that anything different is going to "feel" difficult. And for the majority of people they "learnt" to use a computer when they learnt Windows95/ME/XP and Office98/2000/2003. And having to learn to use Linux implies having to learn *again* how to use it and they dont have the time to do it.

I remember when my father migrated from Win3.11 to Win95, the first thing he told me is that Microsoft had hidden everything very deep. The truth is that everything is there but we all had to re-learn how to use the computer (as we use the computer trough the OS).

The same thing will happen with the new Office UI. Of course, the current menu driven interface is terrible in my opinion. It is okey when you have few options, but as we have seen when you have *lots* of options what you will achieve is to hide those options in the deepest submenu entry along with 15 more options ont hat submenu.

Re:So what?

[AaronBrethorst]

Tell your flatmate that she can go into MS Word, go to the File menu, choose Open, type the URL she wants directly into the textbox, and press enter. This will load the webpage into Word in the same fashion as she would expect if she clicked the Word button in IE.

Cheers,
aaron

Re:So what?

[eighty4]

I only ever use MS Word at work, but cheers for the tip :)

Re:So what?

[Photo_Nut]

Of course I didn't RTFA

And everything you wrote was off topic, and yet people moderated you to +4 "Insightful".

What Microsoft has done differently this time is that it used its army of lawyers to trademark, patent, copyright, and protect every aspect of the "ribbon". This is a licence to use UI designs, which Microsoft has protected. Knowing infringing patents increases the damages a good deal. So by promoting this licensing agreement, Microsoft is basically ensuring that people know that there are patents. What Slashdot is doing is propagating that knowledge.

Here's what you wrote:
Seriously - would you lose any sleep because MS won't give you a new toy? Even if OO.o wanted it, and even if MS gave them it, they probably couldn't use it because it'll probably be Vista- (or at least Windows-)only.

Microsoft isn't giving you a new toy. It's licensing the right to use patents/other IP to people who don't compete with Office.

And seeing as most critics have slammed the new MS Office UI as being generally awful, it's not beyond the realms of possibility that OO.o's similarity to the "old" MS Office UI might pick them up a few users.

I doubt it. You haven't read enough. Obviously, you haven't RTFA so you don't know WTF you are talking about. Let me give you another FA not to read here.

"Software is not interchangable, as the StarOffice marketing team is learning. Even when the price is zero, the cost of switching from Microsoft Office is non-zero. Until the switching cost becomes zero, desktop office software is not truly a commodity. And even the smallest differences can make two software packages a pain to switch between."

And seeing as most critics have slammed the new MS Office UI as being generally awful, it's not beyond the realms of possibility that OO.o's similarity to the "old" MS Office UI might pick them up a few users.

Where do you read that? Microsoft is taking a gamble with the new UI by introducing a lot of change. You apparently don't read the same reviews that I do. Maybe you just don't read reviews. So let me look around for some Office 2007 reviews...

PC Magazine
"Pros: New interface give beginners the same power as experts. Dazzling new graphics engine. Massively improved security. Smoother collaboration.

Cons:
Not all applications get an interface overhaul. New interface can't be customized--yet. Potential for document-sharing problems with users of versions before Office 2003."

Pointer to 22 page review on NeoWin I found the comments following the link to the review interesting.

There is a reason why I don't read /. very often, and your +4 insightful reply is neither +4 nor insightful.

By replying to this, I know I'm giving up my moderating/meta-moderating power, so people who do meta moderate... please do your job and remove this gibberish...

Re:So what?

[eighty4]

used its army of lawyers to trademark, patent, copyright, and protect every aspect of the "ribbon"

IANAL (but I do have a Law degree), but good luck trademarking or copyrighting an interface. I'm also pretty sure you can't patent it either - it's still just a customisable series of buttons. So it isn't MS "protecting" their IP, it's another MS attempt at a protection racket (a la the Novell deal).

Microsoft isn't giving you a new toy. It's licensing the right to use patents/other IP to people who don't compete with Office.

you can't licence rights that you legally don't have (see above), and it's totally a new toy. OO.o (or anyone else, "competing" or not) have absolutely no need to use the ribbon.

You apparently don't read the same reviews that I do. Maybe you just don't read reviews.

Well I didn't RTFA, or any of your links, so take a guess. You must be new around here. (That was a joke, seeing as you seem to have had a sense of humour bypass). But I have read the other comments, and plenty of people have linked to or referenced bad reviews of the Ribbon.

There is a reason why I don't read /. very often, and your +4 insightful reply is neither +4 nor insightful.

By replying to this, I know I'm giving up my moderating/meta-moderating power, so people who do meta moderate... please do your job and remove this gibberish...

Yeah, because it's far more constructive to complain about the moderation instead of working to fix the moderation... Or perhaps you just wanted to have a moan. Feel good to get that off your chest, kiddo?

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do us all a favor and just shut up. You are not informative or insightful. Just pathetic.

OO excluded from the license?

[Sicnarf]

from the licence:
"e. "Excluded Products" are software products or components, or web-based or hosted services that perform primarily the same general functions as the Microsoft Office Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Access software applications, and that are created or marketed as a replacement for any or all of those Microsoft applications."

i'm not sure if openoffice was created or marketed as a replacement to ms office. from their mission statement: "To create, as a community, the leading international office suite that will run on all major platforms and provide access to all functionality and data through open-component based APIs and an XML-based file format."

Re:OO excluded from the license?

[craagz]

I am currently running both Office 2007, to test out the ribbon and OOo, becoz it is Open.

I don't find them competing (as of now). Once MS Office 2007 is disabled after March 2007 i will just uninstall it.

They run pretty well on the same system, nothing like putting two anti virus programs would do.

I hate the ribbon, and hope OOo doesn't follow MS.

Compatibility

[just_another_sean]

While I love to sell OO to my friends on the fact that it's so compatible with Office that's the only thing about it's compatibility that I like.

Office for the most part has had a good UI. It has served people well over the years with millions of people getting used to it and being productive with it. Copying the interface and features of Office is a good way to get people to switch (Hey, it's free and it does the same thing, cool!).

But in the end I think all this "we can do that too" mentality ends up stifling free software. While I applaud the efforts of OO and am grateful for it's inclusion in modern distros I would also love to see them wake up one day and deceide they were going to take a "and now for something completely different" approach. Forget chasing the MS UI. Come up with your own, or stick to the one that's in there already and work on optimizing OO's use of resources. Create more filters for different file formats. Expand on the scripting capabilities to make OO a better tool for office automation. The UI is fine the way it is! Tweak it, yeah, but redo it to make it look like MS every few years? Screw that!

I understand why they do it but watching the OO team spend the next few years implementing knock offs of ribbons only to see these supplanted by some new inane concept in Office 2010 just seems like a waste to me.

Re:Compatibility

[udderly]

I still don't understand why most people think that they need MS Office as opposed to the numerous lower priced or free offerings. Most people simply don't understand that you *do not* need a $400 office suite for word processing. No joke, most people I know think that MS Word is the only way to type a letter to Grandma.

Of the 500 or so users who work for my customers, only two individuals use any of the "advanced" features of Office. And both of these only use Mail Merge to create mass mailings. Hardly justifies the expense.

Most people do not even understand how to even properly format documents in MS Word, yet they blindly drop $400 every time a new version comes out. Ridiculous.

Re:Compatibility

[Trelane]

While I applaud the efforts of OO and am grateful for it's inclusion in modern distros I would also love to see them wake up one day and deceide they were going to take a "and now for something completely different" approach.

If they do something radically different, nobody will use it because it's Too Different, and hence a) hard to learn and b) expensive to train (heard this one in conjunction with Linux, eh?). If they do something too much the same, then nobody will use it because it's no different from the monopoly offering that everyone has and is familiar with. Catch-22.

Never mind that the new Office UI retraining difference costs will be pooh-poohed and shoved under the rug....

Re:Compatibility

[matvei]

But in the end I think all this "we can do that too" mentality ends up stifling free software. While I applaud the efforts of OO and am grateful for it's inclusion in modern distros I would also love to see them wake up one day and deceide they were going to take a "and now for something completely different" approach.

Take a look at LyX for a completely different take on word processing. I've found its user interface to be very pleasant to work with---all you have to do is write, and everything turns out looking great without you having to give it any thought. It's not compatible with MS Office or OO.o, but it's still great for creating PDFs and printed documents.

Re:Compatibility

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Most people simply don't understand that you *do not* need a $400 office suite for word processing.

I think perhaps it's you who doesn't understand. Most people don't pay $400 for MS Office. Businesses typically have volume licensing agreements that work out far cheaper. Those home users who have legal copies generally get one of the cut-down versions (possibly just Word) thrown in as part of a bundle with a new PC, just like Windows, and don't notice the cost because it's a relatively small part of a much larger number. Of the small number of home users who do buy it separately, most are smart enough to buy an upgrade rather than a new product, having established a chain of previously licensed software back to the dawn of time. Seriously, I don't know anyone who has ever paid anything like full price for the whole MS Office suite off-the-shelf.

You're absolutely right about the advanced features, though. It annoys the **** out of me that even though we use Word documents all the time at work, almost no-one understands basic concepts like style sheets for formatting. I sat in a video-enabled conference call with about a dozen senior members of staff the other day, and watched as the consultant leading the discussion spent literally minutes (out of a one-hour meeting) trying to get the extra bullet point we'd decided to add to a list to look the same as all the others. I shudder to think how much money that simple exercise cost due to the wasted time of all those other staff.

Re:Compatibility

[coding_sheep]

Business customers are paying the $400 to get Outlook not Word. Outlook's calendar is used to schedule most activities in large organizations. So really it is the integration provided by Exchange that people are paying for. If you don't use/need that integration then you are wasting $400.

Re:Compatibility

[udderly]

Businesses typically have volume licensing agreements that work out far cheaper.

Most of my customers are small business with fewer than 10 employees, so many of them are not eligible for big volume discounts (my nonprofit customers get MS products cheaply though). I was cabling a collision repair customer's shop yesterday and he had four MS Office SBE packages on his desk that he had purchased the previous day from Sam's Club. Why he didn't purchase OEM Versions from us is beyond me, since I ended up installing the software and will probably also end up supporting it. One of the reasons that he bought the Office suites is that it was in the "System Requirements" for his industry-specific software.

Of the small number of home users who do buy it separately, most are smart enough to buy an upgrade rather than a new product, having established a chain of previously licensed software back to the dawn of time.

Lol...probably true. However, upgrades are not that much cheaper, for example: http://www.samsclub.com/shopping/search.do?searcht ype=simple&catg=5678&simplesearchfor=Microsoft+Off ice&simpleitemtype=&x=0&y=0

What would be smarter--though not necessarily legal--is to buy a Teacher & Students Edition off the intarweb for next to nothing http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Office-Student-Tea cher-Macintosh/dp/B0001WN16M.

Re:Compatibility

[udderly]

That's definitely true for medium and large entities who can afford an IT staff. I'm not so sure about small businesses like most of my customers. Many of them use odd mismatches of Outlook Express, webmail and Lord knows what else to do their email.

Not that it contradicts what you are saying, but my experience working for many years at a Fortune 100 company is exactly the opposite. I worked as a copy writer at the regional headquarters for this outfit but spent most of my time addressing the rest of the computer-illiterate staff's technical issues--like finding documents they saved and assuring them that the color of the floppy disk was not related to its function. Why floppy disks? Because nobody could understand how to save anything on the network shares.

Don't even get me started about some of the stupid computer conversations that I had there. Needless to say, they didn't exactly make full use of the Exchange server that they had. No calendaring, no tasks, no contact lists--only email.

Re:Compatibility

[drsmithy]

Business customers are paying the $400 to get Outlook not Word. Outlook's calendar is used to schedule most activities in large organizations. So really it is the integration provided by Exchange that people are paying for. If you don't use/need that integration then you are wasting $400.

If you have Exchange you don't need to buy Outlook - every Exchange CAL includes an Outlook license.

Re:Compatibility

[Elsan]

I assume you haven't seen KOffice all that well, my friend or more specifically the results of their GUI contest. They decided they wanted a new interface and did what was needed. Wait 'till it comes out. OO.o is not(and will not) be the only competitor to Office.

what what what?

[awb131]

The license isn't royalty-free if you're building Office-style apps. So I ask, why would anyone want a royalty-free license for the user interface for Office applications (word processor, spreadsheet, database, personal info manager) unless they were building applications that would compete against Office?

Brain explodes.

Re:what what what?

[DaFork]

Development IDEs, text editors, web browsers, anti-virus consoles...

You don't have to be a competitor of MS Office to pull the traditional CUA menu bar out into a ribbon.

Gently places your brain back into your skull.

Re:what what what?

[kckman]

Having the "look and feel" of a common application for windows can minimize training for the application. If they behave and look similarly, the idea is they are easier to adopt with minimal training or retraining. We tend to forget about the "User Community" sometimes when we /.'ers tend to tinker and experiment.

Re:what what what?

[a.d.trick]

Because the library is not were it belongs. It's really quite possible to build a 'non-office' application that makes use of those controls. As to why the UI is included with Office? It's probably just a nasty trick to force people to buy Office because applications need it for their guis.

What gap ?

[alexhs]

With the gap between OO and MS Office widening

You mean Microsoft Office 2007 is so much worse than OpenOffice.org 2.0 and Microsoft Office 2003 ?
It still doesn't number paragraphs (1.1, 1.2) or update references automatically whitout dirty hacks ?
It still retains locks on directories when closed ?
It still somehow corrupt your document once in a while (*) ?
...

(*) Last month I needed to save the document as an XML document because saving it as .doc would cause MS Office to crash a few ops after opening the file.

Re:What gap ?

[smallguy78]

Last month? It's only been out for 2 weeks. That was a *beta* you were using, and sounds like Word not Office. I've not had any of the problems you've mentioned from using Word 2007 for the past 2 weeks solidly to write fascinating functional specifications.

Re:What gap ?

[1u3hr]

. I've not had any of the problems you've mentioned from using Word 2007 for the past 2 weeks

Isn't it always the NEXT version of Office that's going to be bug-free? Maybe, after 20 years, they'e got it right? Next: hydrogen fusion is just around the corner.

Re:What gap ?

[alexhs]

I was talking about the Microsoft Office 2003 I need to suffer at work. Sorry if it wasn't clear.

If you want details :

Paragraphs numbering : MS Word. Most people here are using old canvas where numbering works. I asked to one guy how it was achieving it. He did tenths of tries clicking everywhere until it worked. Couldn't get a straightforward procedure. Out of curiosity, launched OpenOffice.org 2.0 at home. Did what seemed straightforward to me (selecting 1.1 scheme in bullets and numbering), almost same place as in MS-Office, and it just worked.

Locks : MS Excel. Import an XML file. Close Excel. Try to delete the directory in which the XML file belongs to. Doesn't work. XML file goes away but not the directory. AFAIK only two solutions : reboot MS-Windows or restart excel and import another document in another directory, to move the lock.

Document corruption : MS Word. It implied the integrated drawing tool. Just before crashing, funny things happened. I was writing in a text box and the text would be written to another text box at the same time. Seems two objects had the same index...

While I'm at it : Why does an Acces DB always grow, even when you're removing entries ?

Re:What gap ?

[novus ordo]

It has to do with how it stores data. I think you need to use compact n repair every once in a while. More info here.

Re:What gap ?

[spectecjr]

Paragraphs numbering : MS Word. Most people here are using old canvas where numbering works. I asked to one guy how it was achieving it. He did tenths of tries clicking everywhere until it worked. Couldn't get a straightforward procedure. Out of curiosity, launched OpenOffice.org 2.0 at home. Did what seemed straightforward to me (selecting 1.1 scheme in bullets and numbering), almost same place as in MS-Office, and it just worked.

Er... you must be crazy.

Open Word 2003
Type "1.1 This is a test" and hit ENTER.

You now have a bulleted list in the format you want. Hit tab to go in levels (eg. 1.2.1), shift+tab to go out.

Alternatively, from the Format menu, select "Bullets and Numbering".

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're saying, but it all looks like it works totally fine to me.

Re:What gap ?

[alexhs]

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're saying, but it all looks like it works totally fine to me.

Well I'm not sure why I wrote "paragraphs", I meant titles. I want 1. to be style title 1, 1.1 to be style title 2 and so on.

Alternatively, from the Format menu, select "Bullets and Numbering".

That was what I was complaining about, I can't make it work with titles, although it works with open office :

I write :
title 1
title 2

set title 1 as style Title 1
set title 2 as style Title 2

Go to "Bullets and numbering", select the good one, validate, and now I've

1. title 1
1.1 title 2

Doesn't work on MS Word.

Your solution also works on Open Office but text remain standard, doesn't become title (but given you were answering the wrong problem...)

I'm used to write structured documents : HTML, LaTeX... and usually working on the presentation as the last step. So using tabulations just seems wrong to me : why would a subtitle need to be to the right of the parent title ? Moreover, you wouldn't want to insert tabulations through the whole document when the writing is finished : I've tried to modify the style after numbering the first titles but MS Word has no problem with having two title 1 styles, one numbered and one not numbered.

Er... you must be crazy.

You didn't need to be rude.

how about prior art?

[p80]

the funny thing is that Quanta+ in KDE has had a similar UI with a ribbon for years now:
http://quanta.kdewebdev.org/screenshots//shot2.png
http://quanta.kdewebdev.org/screenshots//shot13.pn g

Do they need a license too?

Re:how about prior art?

[WhitePanther5000]

Yeah, not to mention Bluefish or Dreamweaver... It's a pretty common concept in web development applications, and I guess MS just decided to be "original" and throw it into an office suite.

Stealing ideas has gotten them this far... why stop now?

Re:how about prior art?

[Anonymous Coward]

Delphi and C++ Builder by Borland had it a while also. In all honesty Office's is a bit more elaborate than that though.

Re:how about prior art?

[Repugnant_Shit]

Oh man, now I realize that I will absolutely HATE the new Office UI. Quanta's ribbon has always bothered, so I turn it completely off. Ugh.

Re:how about prior art?

[SilentChris]

No offense dude, but static tabs running across the top of the screen (which is essentially what Quanta+ uses) is nothing like the ribbon in the new Office.

The new Office UI dynamically changes based on what you're doing. The ribbon starts with some common (and buried) features for the task you're working on (like changing a font). As you use it, the ribbon drops what you use infrequently and presents new choices. This is nothing like Quanta, and it's clear you haven't used Office's new UI at all.

That's not to say it's a *good* UI. I personally have had a rough time getting used to it. But comparing it to stuff like Quanta makes no sense whatsoever.

Re:how about prior art?

[smitty97]

The new Office UI dynamically changes based on what you're doing. The ribbon starts with some common (and buried) features for the task you're working on (like changing a font). As you use it, the ribbon drops what you use infrequently and presents new choices. This is nothing like Quanta, and it's clear you haven't used Office's new UI at all.

I hate that shit. That's not new either. It's the "personalized menus" that hides all the commands you're looking for. What useless garbage. I love reinstalling an app and having to hunt for shit. I suppose "muscle memory" doesn't mean anything to you.

Re:how about prior art?

[SilentChris]

Did I say it was good? No. I said it was different. Two separate things.

Re:how about prior art?

[StreetStealth]

And so has Blender.

Re:how about prior art?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it's not personalized menus at all. The "personalized menus" thing was all about showing items based on frequency of use, which the ribbon has none of. The ribbon changes to reflect choices based on the task at hand. There are no graphic manipulation tools if no graphic is selected, for example. The key to the ribbon is that it only shows relevant options and everything is always in the same place. Things won't move from one side of a tab to the other and usable options won't disappear from a tab. Since your ribbon will always look like my ribbon, reinstalling the app or going to another computer does not cause confusion.

dom

Re:how about prior art?

[Anonymous Coward]

The UI in macos8 and 9 had so called ribbons, they were handy too. I dunno how they relate to office ones.

Re:how about prior art?

[camperdave]

You don't need a license to copy the functionality and feel of a product. You only need a license for the actual graphics and code. This was all settled last century.

Re:how about prior art?

[SEMW]

Either you're a troll or you're seriously misinformed. The ribbon does not change depending on usage frequency. For a given tab and screen resolution, it's completely static.

Re:MS Office UI sucks anyway

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't even know what this is all about, do you?

This is about the new user interface concept called "Ribbon" used in Office 2007.

Sometimes I wonder if Slashdot readers even bother reading those articles they dare to comment...

Implementation guidelines...

[SpanishArcher]

...drag and drop the attached OCX to your application.
Congratulation :)

Menu structures are common across different models

[davecb]

Many moons ago, I worked on a product which started out using a "lotus 1-2-3" menu structure: one typed "/" then selected from a one-line list of options by typing individual characters.

My Smarter Colleagues noticed that from the same data structure we used for the lotus menus we could build PF-key menus, modern cascading drop-down menus and right-mouse-button pop-up menus.

Which means that for any menu sequence of head->middle->middle*->tail, you can change the visual appearance of the menu without changing the application-level calls used to create it. And that in turn means you can make "ribbon menus" a user-specifiable "skin".

--dave

isn't it just a modern/fancy lotus 123 style menu?

[mcn]

I am not a programmer/developer/UI designer. But to me, it seems like the new UI is just the horizontal equivalent of the vertical pull-down menu, with some sugar coating here and there. "Transpose" all those pull-downs and it more or less becomes a ribbon. It seems like the equivalent of the lotus 123 slash ("/") command, where pressing "/" brings you the horizontal menu.

The bigger question is who cares

[sbraab]

Did you look at the UI preview guide? Maybe it is just me, but it looks yet another attempt to change the UI for the sake of change. They have taken the concepts of menus, toolbars, dialog boxes and palettes and combined them in to one big tabbed blob that takes ups even more of the top of each window. Of course it is similar to, but in no way consistent with that annoying new interface they put on IE7. The only thing they have managed to keep consistent in windows is the need to press ^-alt-Del to login. They just don't get it.

One again: Trying to trick the customers.

[Futurepower(R)]

I hope companies will see this for what it is: An attempt by Microsoft to do with a license trick what they are not able to accomplish with product quality.

There is a social breakdown happening at Microsoft. Bill Gates is, apparently, no longer interested. The company is becoming more and more unable to complete projects.

Microsoft never competed very well on technological merits, but now things are becoming worse. People think that Microsoft has been successful, but the company's success has always depended on tricking customers who don't have much technical knowledge. As customers become more technically knowledgeable, they realize more and more that Microsoft is adversarial.

We who read Slashdot can make a difference. We can explain the issues to everyone we know and meet.

--
Comedy and Tragedy of the Bush administration

Lipstick on a pig

[QuietLagoon]

Microsoft put a new UI on MS Office because Microsoft said that the users of MS Office could not find all of the features in the product. What Microsoft has not commented upon was whether the users wanted to find any more of the features besides the ones that they use.

I would venture to say that the overwhelming majority of MS Office users do not need to use, or even want to use, most of the features that are present in those bloated applications.

Re:Lipstick on a pig

[stubear]

"I would venture to say..."

For those who do not speak slashbot, the OP is saying "Anything I say from this point on is going to be pulled straight from my ass so it supports my initial hypothesis. Please do not look for, nor expect, any atual factual data to backup my comments. In fact, be fully prepared to do the research yourself and discover that I couldn't be more wrong if I tried. Thanks for listening and use Ubuntu, it's the most friendly linux desktop available."

Re:Lipstick on a pig

[westlake]

I would venture to say that the overwhelming majority of MS Office users do not need to use, or even want to use, most of the features that are present in those bloated applications

which doesn't mean a damn thing when you considering which office suite to deploy and support across an entire organization.

Re:Lipstick on a pig

[KarmaMB84]

If you're doing a serious document for more than a shopping list, you'll probably need at least a handful of features that are just a pain in the ass to get to in Word 2k3 and earlier.

always could use windows UI?

[Anonymous Coward]

developers could always use the Windows API for GUI - that's the point of the platform, and getting developers to use it (on Windows) is the entirely how a "platform" is valuable. Users don't buy the platform, they buy the stuff that runs on it.

How is this different, except that maybe the ribbon is counted as part of the apps, and not the OS?

As usual, Slashdot doesnt get it.

[LibertineR]

You can almost hear all the knee-jerking going on around here.

For all the things you can say about Microsoft, regardless of your perspective, you have to agree that what keeps Microsoft in business is the way they have treated developers.

Raise your hand (if you are used to being PAID for your code) if you have time to develop your own version of the ribbon within the scope of your next project?

Look, Microsoft has all this new shit coming out with Vista and Office 07, and those of us who see coding as a PROFIT center, instead of just something to do to earn our Geek Cred, will take this latest offering and run with it all the way to the bank.

You can say its all about lock-in, you can say that they are stifling innovation all you want. Someday, it would be cool for Slashdot to understand that there are thousands of developers who code for MONEY, not self-esteem, and dont care where their tools come from if those tools help get projects completed faster and better than without them.

If Microsoft can give me tools that insure that every project I do next year comes in on time and on budget, they can slap my momma for all I care.

"Developers, Developers, Developers" may be a running joke around here, and you may not be a fan of MSDN and the other tool sets, but if you code Windows solutions for pay, fuck you, I'm using them.

Time is money, bitches!

Re:As usual, Slashdot doesnt get it.

[gilgongo]

Raise your hand (if you are used to being PAID for your code) if you have time to develop your own version of the ribbon within the scope of your next project?

Before you talk about knee-jerk reactions you might want to at least UNDERSTAND what MS are doing here. They are NOT giving you any CODE. They are simply allowing you to COPY their UI.

Go to the download page: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/office/aa973809.a spx

See any code? Libraries? SDK?

Now do you still want to thank them so much?

Re:As usual, Slashdot doesnt get it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you even read the article?

Buying a license from them gets you two things.

First, you get Microsoft's permission to use the Office 2007 style GUI without threat of being sued.

Second, you get guidelines on how to BUILD YOUR OWN ribbon interface. That's right, Microsoft don't give you any code. This isn't something you can drop in and go - you must build it yourself, or buy an implementation from someone else.

So basically, you're talking shit, and then insulting people too.

Re:As usual, Slashdot doesnt get it.

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you don't get it. RTFA. Microsoft are not offering any code here. They are offering the "right" for people to do their own implementations of the Ribbon Bar, etc.

There is no such "right" they can offer.

They are trying to trap interested developers into following a 120-page style guide. That's all. Nothing to do with your bottom line unless you're idiotic enough to sign up.

You can buy a ribbon bar in from various commercial vendors without talking to Microsoft. That will help you. Nothing on MSDN will help you implement the latest Office UI - it never has, and it never will. MS don't like to make that easy and here they are proving it by throwing barriers up.

If you understood the argument you were making you'd be reliant on 3rd-party vendors for this stuff already. MSDN is a joke for modern glossy UI development.

Re:As usual, Slashdot doesnt get it.

[MartinJW]

Microsoft might not personally be providing the libraries to facilitate this - but there are other 3rd party vendors who are - and Microsofts new license now legitimises these. Personally, as someone who does get paid to code, I am looking forward to implementing the ribbon in a future product.

Re:As usual, Slashdot doesnt get it.

[Tony]

Microsoft might not personally be providing the libraries to facilitate this - but there are other 3rd party vendors who are - and Microsofts new license now legitimises these.

Do you realize how bizarre this sounds? Why do we need Microsoft to "legitimize" anything like this? It's a UI element, nothing more, and they aren't even providing it, nor did they invent it.

Remember back in the '80s, when Apple sued Microsoft over the "look-and-feel" of MS-Windows? Remember how Microsoft won that battle? Now they are trying to have someone else's cake and eat it, too. They want to threaten other people concerning the use of "look-and-feel."

Bah. Fuck 'em. This is just another indication of their arrogance.

I use DotNetBar in a custom vertical app. The ribbon is going to be used for a lot of stuff because it's the new cool bright shiny thing, and the menu bar is old and broken. But, that won't stop it from sucking.

Re:As usual, Slashdot doesnt get it.

[NineNine]

"Developers, Developers, Developers" may be a running joke around here, and you may not be a fan of MSDN and the other tool sets, but if you code Windows solutions for pay, fuck you, I'm using them.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Part of the reason that MS is successful is because there is nobody out there that makes development for their platform as easy as MS. Maybe if some other companies would have somebody screaming about developers and throwing chairs, then those companies would be just as successful in this way. MS gives me tools, and makes it EASY. The OSS community tells me to RTFM. I'll give ya' one guess what I use to develop my business tools.

Re:As usual, Slashdot doesnt get it.

[kimvette]

There aren't any controls released to facilitate the development of this? You mean they seem to think that independent developers need THEIR permission to develop custom controls which are actually derived from Adobe's GUI techniques, which predate Microsoft's "innovative" ribbon by at least ten years?

How "generous" of Microsoft to grant such permission!

Hey Sun! Take a good look at Microsoft's ribbon, then at Adobe Creative Suite, realize that Microsoft's patent is nothing more than a farce based on Adobe's original take on this (they just didn't call it a "ribbon") and go to town in OpenOffice.org. :)

(insert an F-bomb Microsoft here)

Re:As usual, Slashdot doesnt get it.

[Anonymous Coward]

While I agree that Microsoft has done a better job than most when disseminating development information, I think this "ribbon UI" thing is a step backwards. Unlike the many other Windows interface guidelines -- which are freely and anonymously available on their site -- they are instead giving away the new Office interface guidelines provided you agree not to develop a certain kind of application with them. I recall seeing similar restrictions on other downloads recently, like requiring WGA or Passport validation before allowing a download. In each case, they are limiting who gets the information and/or what they can do with it, decreasing the attractiveness of Windows development.

Does this hurt them? Only if the losses due to dissatisfied programmers exceeds the gains due to crippled competitors -- essentially trading a small MS Windows loss for a larger MS Office gain. To make such a decision, they must be feeling confident in their OS monopoly, which implies that we're going to see more of this in the near future. I wonder how long it will be before the Visual Studio license will include an "applications must not compete with existing Microsoft products" disclaimer?

Re:As usual, Slashdot doesnt get it.

[morcheeba]

Re: nobody out there that makes development for their platform as easy as MS

I've been really happy with Apple's tools. They have some advantages -- I hack USB drivers, and OSX+Xcode can do this user-space or kernel-space. MS requires an expensive "driver add-on" to visual studio because windows can only do kernel-space USB drivers. (Thankfully there are is a FOSS solution that essentially provides a tunnel so that you don't have to buy this driver add-on). Also, Apple's Core Data is a gui that lets you design your data structures, and then helps manage the structures. Xcode is free, too, and has neat features like distributed compilation.

Re:As usual, Slashdot doesnt get it.

[NineNine]

Oh, I'm not saying that MS's framework does everything. I certainly wouldn't try to mess with drivers with plain ol' Win 32 stuff. It's just not made to do that easily. But for what most development consists of (high level stuff, like a front end and a middle tier and a database), nothing beats MS.

My current project is a middleware piece to connect my point of sale retail system to my web site. There's a little database in the middle to handle all of the extra info that our POS doesn't capture (product images, long descriptions, shipping costs, etc.), and a front end that I slapped together in no time at all, using Windows standard widgets (buttons, windows, treeview, sliders, web browser, FTP, etc.). I can't really say that I'm aware of another product or platform that will allow this to be done as easily and quickly.

Frankly...

[eno2001]

...I think OO.o could benefit from a better UI design rather than aping MS Office. The MS Office and OO.o UIs are too cluttered. I'd suggest something more collapsable and more sparingly reliant on just icons on the less used features. The other suggestion I'd make is to make the OO.o interface more "modal" in a way. As much as I hate 'vi' and it's modality, I think modes could be done right for Office apps. Again, you have all of the most common functionality available in the default mode with little or no space devoted to less popular features. Obviously this would require a study to rank the uasge of features. But there just aren't that many people who use "mail merge" on a daily basis unless they're in the business world. Maybe even having default "Home User" vs. "Business User" modes for OO.o would help. Just a few suggestions anyway. (Even though this is the wrong place for that)

Re:Frankly...

[amliebsch]

I'd suggest something more collapsable and more sparingly reliant on just icons on the less used features. The other suggestion I'd make is to make the OO.o interface more "modal" in a way. As much as I hate 'vi' and it's modality, I think modes could be done right for Office apps. Again, you have all of the most common functionality available in the default mode with little or no space devoted to less popular features.

Congratulations, you just described Office 2007.

Re:Frankly...

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Ironically, it is exactly the kind of study you talk about that led Microsoft to produce this new UI. There will inevitably be resistance to change, but after a while I suspect the usability guys will win, because they have solid research behind them and users are fickle creatures.

That doesn't negate your main point about free software alternatives not just cloning MS UI, of course. Look at Firefox: innovative UI features not present in the established MS product, in an overall clean and usable interface, makes a product that is eating MS market share at a rate that must have them taking notice. Compare and contrast with OpenOffice.org, where the UI is basically a poor quality clone of the equivalent MS Office applications, and pretty much no-one uses it outside of a few geeks. Firefox's method is better.

Re:Frankly...

[GigsVT]

That's doubtful. I've never known anyone that doesn't turn their Windows install to "classic mode" UI after about 5 seconds of files opening themselves just because you highlighted them.

MS history shows a long string of failed UI experiments.

Re:Frankly...

[eno2001]

Heh... to each their own. I actually prefer XP's native mode to classic mode as it's much more task oriented and totally obscures the file system. It's the only way that Windows makes sense (and I HATE Windows). Classic mode always seemed kind of backwards to me since it was always pretending to be something it wasn't: and OO desktop. Of course I'm an old Mac user from the Pre-OS X days and I liked knowing that the file I was clicking on was REALLY the file I was using. No shortcuts. No symlinks. Just pure order at it's best. And with self contained binaries with no DLLs or libs all over creation, My application installation was just dragging and dropping an icon. If I moved the application file, it still worked because outside of preference files, it was completely self contained. And preferences were always in one place too. Windows gets all of that wrong. *nix is only a little better in some ways, but improving all the time. By the way, I always meant to ask you... why GigsVT? Just curious about the why behind the UID.

Re:Frankly...

[GigsVT]

Gigs is my nickname in real life, and I went to Virginia Tech (though I wouldn't recommend going there).

Ever-increasing number of features

[RareButSeriousSideEf]

"Will traditional menus/toolbars hold up to an ever-increasing number of features, or will OO be forced to take on a new UI paradigm?"

How about turning that on it's head? "Will the paradigm of an ever-increasing number of features hold up to the reality of having to present them in a UI of some sort?"

I've been using office-style apps heavily since about Office 4, and I haven't seen many new features at all that I consider essential -- *especially* not ones that require adding UI elements to accommodate them. MS's own focus group studies show time and time again that 90% of Office features end up in the "rarely used" category anyway.

I use Office 2007 some, and I'm pretty neutral on the ribbon since I do most tasks via keyboard shortcut anyway. For my money (or lack thereof), let OOo keep its traditional menus & toolbars. Just make keyboard shortcuts consistent across an office suite, get the fundamental features right, minimize the bugs & make the memory & disk footprints as light as you can.

The Ribbon may be da new shiznit and whatnot, and by virtue of MS's market penetration may even end up being the "look" that all others are compared to. Even if that happens, though, I have a hard time seeing *feature bloat* being the driving factor behind what UI paradigm wins out.

Re:Ever-increasing number of features

[RealGrouchy]

I've been using office-style apps heavily since about Office 4, and I haven't seen many new features at all that I consider essential -- *especially* not ones that require adding UI elements to accommodate them.

Exactly; me too. And if I did, there are plenty of ways of customizing the UI to improve access to that element.

- RG>

Re:Ha-ha!

[PDAllen]

No, of course they can't. The idea is that a lot of developers who don't want to write an Office competitor anyway may well be interested in the freebie: it makes their product look like an MS product and it's (presumably) easier to use the freebie than write your own MS-style UI code. For the average customer, MS-style means it looks professional. Which is a big selling point.

What MS get out of this is that when you have a desktop full of applications which all have one UI style, any other style looks out of place, so the competition looks bad. Same deal as with VB: you can write your app in VB and it does a lot of GUI creation for you, but what you get will be MS-style buttons and so on.

The only thing OO needs to compete

[bealzabobs_youruncle]

is slightly better performance, initial feedback on the ribbon has been almost universally negative and there is no reason for other devs to rush to mediocrity. This is truly nothing more than an attempt at viral marketing.

Re:Ha-ha!

[TheSunborn]

But Microsoft don't give out ANY code to the new ui. So it's a
"Ok you may clone our look and feel, but you have to write all the code your self."

Writing a normal look and feel application would be much more easy, because windows contains much of the needed widget code.

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain

[Anonymous Coward]

Drink the kool-Aid and sign the document. Microsoft wants to get universal buy-in that the UI is proprietary and that they clearly own it. If you sign you give away rights. They also want your help in setting that up as a standard, but don't want to have to relinquish their rights to freeze you out should you get into an area that they find profitable. You see the problem with having something be a standard is that it is good for you, because your users like things that are the same everywhere they go (look at McDonalds success) but if you let everyone make things that are similar to yours like RFC Standards then you can't own them. Drat! Solution set up a Standard but get everyone to sign away their rights to it. Brilliant!

Re:MS Office UI sucks anyway

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. The cleanest, least cluttered user interface I ever came across was smartsuit, particularly the wordpro part of it. Modeless, instantly effective option boxes were excellent. You could see the effect of your changes instantly, almost never resorting to menus.

I keep hoping that OO will implement something similar...

Re:The myth of OS X GUI consistency.

[Anonymous Coward]

While OS X may be more consistent than some others, I would not say it is the be-all-end-all of interface consistency. I can currently think of at least 5 separate GUI styles: Aqua, Metal, Combined Aqua (is that Uno? Whatever the name is...), iTunes 7 (pure ugliness), and Garage Band (Whatever). Granted, even though the look is different between these, the feel is pretty much the same...

(Disclaimer: I really do like Macs. I just think that one single GUI look is the correct way to do things...)

Pure FUD

[Nitage]

It isn't a license to use a library that implements their UI features - it's a license to implement such a library. They're trying to license something that they don't own...

Re:Ha-ha!

[k33l0r]

I don't know about reviews but personally I hate that god damn ribbon item. I've been using Office 2007 beta 2 since it came out for public downloading and I've really come to despise the thing. Sure it's easier to use basic functions but to do nearly anything beyond changing the font is far more difficult now then it was in Office 2003.

One example I can think of is trying to insert a file (e.g. a web page or .doc file) into a document in Word. I still haven't found out how to do this in the ribbon. Eventually I just added the insert function to the so-called "Quick Access" tool bar.

It's just a shame that I'm too lazy to reinstall 2003...

Ingenuity?

[HangingChad]

The words "Microsoft" and "ingenuity" hardly belong in the same sentence. Considering the billions they allegedly spend on R&D, and I personally don't believe they really spend that much, you'd think they could deliver a better, more reliable product. MSFT has purchased its most innovative products. They haven't developed anything internally that's a home run product in nearly a decade. Their market position is more the result of file formats and OEM agreements than any creative development. They're sort of like Disney after they got rid of all the animators, costume designers and set builders. Just a shell with the name of the imaginative company they used to be.

The open source development model offers a more competitive approach to developing a UI and final product can be configured to user preferences and specific needs. There's no way a focus group will ever be able to compete with an arena where survival of the fittest determines the most useful products and configurations.

Re:Ingenuity?

[NineNine]

There's no way a focus group will ever be able to compete with an arena where survival of the fittest determines the most useful products and configurations.

"Will ever be able to compete"? MS is STILL eating OSS's lunch everywhere except at the web server. Are you living in some sort of parallel universe where OSS is wildly successful, and MS is trying to enter the market using tried and tested QA methods?

Re:Ingenuity?

[marcosdumay]

"There's no way a focus group will ever be able to compete with an arena where survival of the fittest determines the most useful products and configurations."

It depends on how you measure fitness.

ZOMG look at the INNOVATION

[kimvette]

I'm glad Microsoft is so innovative, because, you know, shaping a menu and toolbar differently is new, non-obvious, novel, and there is certainly no prior art containing anything similar, certainly not anything preceding it by a decade.

Given the obvious use of technology here and the subjectiveness of what may constitute a ribbon, and how broadly companies like Microsoft tend to paint their patents, I would contend that their "ribbon" is simply taking the Adobe Creative Suite's toolbar scheme that has been around for a decade and simply repainting it to fit in Microsoft Office components. Likewise, one can argue that since context-sensitive toolbars have been around for about 20 years, and buttons in those toolbars have optionally spawned menus when clicked for at least ten years, that there is NOTHING AT ALL new about a Microsoft "ribbon" aside from the artwork, which is covered by COPYRIGHT, not a patent.

Re:ZOMG look at the INNOVATION

[kimvette]

You know, I think we should start looking up Microsoft's patents and point out any prior art we can find which should invalidate them. Where is the site for providing public-review feedback on patents to the USPTO - it's separate from the USPTO.GOV site, right?

Re:First

[evansky]

loo-hoo-SER!!

just sign right here for your free ui...

[Sfing_ter]

right here, in your own blood, on the dotted line. Did we mention the first male child clause?

Are you delusional?

[shaneh0]

"the dying rattle breaths of a behemoth unable to compete today?"

I'm sorry, but your flair for the dramatic is a little much, even by slashdot standards.

"dying rattle breaths?" "unable to compete?"

Please. Aside from the notorious cash reserves, they're still making profits hand over fist.

When they start posting red ink, then we'll talk, but I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you...

Re:Are you delusional?

[mspohr]

I heard an interesting interview on NPR this morning with the author of a book about the decline of the Roman Empire. He drew a lot of comparisons to the situation of the USA today... that is, an empire at its zenith that makes fundamental changes (primarily loss of freedom in response to terrorism... yes, Rome had problems with terrorists).

I think the Microsoft is in a similar situation. Profits look good now and they are in a monopoly position in many business areas but you can see that they aren't making the changes they need to compete in a rapidly changing world and they are increasingly relying on "undemocratic" measures (patents, format lock-in, etc.) to maintain their power. It's only a matter of time until this fails. It took a long time for the Empire to fall from its zenith and it will take a long time for Microsoft to fade away. One early sign is their stock price which fell dramatically 5 years ago and has been stagnant ever since.

Re:Are you delusional?

[shaneh0]

Yes, that was indeed a good interview. I'd never heard about the pirates attacking the port of rome before. Very well done, but it's Morning Edition. It's *always* well done.

And the analogy to America was proper, and interesting.

But I don't think it's a proper analogy for a company. And this is because you can easily compare the USA to Rome. Many of the same constructs. As the author pointed out, the American system is based on Rome.

But saying that vendor lock-in and patents are a sign that Microsoft is past it's zenith is silly. Look at IBM, for example, and Apple, and Xerox, and the list goes on. Companies are a lot more agile than civilizations. They can control their destiny in ways that a country can't.

I know that this is what you *want* to believe, and you very well could be correct, but there's no evidence supporting it. Every OS they've released has been more successful than the last. Sales and profits still grow at a healthy pace. By the standard of an American Corporation, they are WILDLY successful. Their recent performance only starts to look bad when you compare it to the standards they set 10 years ago.

But that tends to happen. The higher your annual sales, the harder it is to grow 5% a year. The larger your float, the harder it is to grow your stock price. This is inevitable.

Not to mention, the things you mentioned (lock in, etc) were far worse before the Anti Trust suit, which is the period that you must consider to be their zenith.

I'm just being a realist. I don't love or hate Microsoft. I can personally accept that they've done good things for technology and they've done bad things. Just like most other companies. And if Microsoft was showing any indication that it was about to boom or bust I wouldn't have any reason to contradict it. But right now, their ship is running just fine. People that point to Vista shipping late like it's some indication of failure at Microsoft is silly to me. I don't think they've ever shipped an OS on time and it hasn't really hurt them very much.

Why isn't the ribbon UI part of the OS?

[bigdavex]

The ribbon is some sort of widget, right? Why isn't it a part of windows?

Re:Why isn't the ribbon UI part of the OS?

[camperdave]

Maybe because they didn't think of it in time to port it to Vista?

Is This Anti-Competitive?

[ewl1217]

This just doesn't sound right. Here we have a known monopoly, with strong control of the desktop operating system and office suite markets. Isn't it in the slightest bit anti-competitive for them to offer this free to anybody but their competitors? I'm no expert on the legal side of things, but this is the exact kind of thing that anti-trust laws are supposed to prevent.

Ribbon UI is old, from 80's

[Rastignac]

Miss Pac-Man already had one years ago... ;)

Just another attack on the GPL...?

[Half-pint HAL]

From the article:

You can use the UI in open source projects as long as the license terms are consistent with our license.

But of course the GPL doesn't allow you to say that your code can't be used in Office-like apps.

Never mind, I don't see how the license can apply to anyone who doesn't agree with it.

HAL. (Not following the link!)

Balance sheet liability?

[Anonymous Coward]

What effing balanace sheet liability? Please define exactly what you mean, Mr. Ballmer.

Sorry, way off topic, but I'm still reeling from that one...

the url is wrong on slashdot!

[fredan]

it should be http://developers.developers.developers.slashdot.o rg/article.pl?sid=06/11/22/0140215 :-)

Another attempt to poison the well

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet another facet of the same Microsoft strategy that includes the Novell patent partnership.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

[camperdave]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the UI cloning battle fought a long time ago (the spreadsheet wars and the battle for the trash can). The courts ruled that it is OK to make a program work in the same manner, to copy the "feel" of a program. However, it is not OK to copy the specific artwork of a program.

Besides, To me, it looks like the Ribbon interface is merely horizontal menus instead of vertical menus, based on the couple of screenshots I've seen of it. Whooptie-flippin'-doo!

Re:Correct me if I'm wrong.

[mikael]

Besides, To me, it looks like the Ribbon interface is merely horizontal menus instead of vertical menus, based on the couple of screenshots I've seen of it.

I was wondering about that too - as far as I could tell from the video, it looks like a Trolltech Qt QTabWidget with a whole load of icons and QComboBox widgets on each page.

Sheep!

[Knuckles]

It continues to amaze me how sheepish MS fanboys are. From the blog comments

Wow, this is incredibly generous. Thank you, Microsoft!

. And no, I don't think this is cynical, there are many many others in this vein. Sad, really.

Re:Sheep!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, like you don't greedily suck down every last drop of cum that seaps from RMS' cock. GPL folk are the most "sheepish" people on earth.

What the poster seems to say

[Anonymous Coward]

From main post:
What does this mean for OpenOffice? Will traditional menus/toolbars hold up to an ever-increasing number of features, or will OO be forced to take on a new UI paradigm?

For starters, it means OOO will have to stop ripping off MS's ideas.

Oh, and a quick translation for the non-bullshitters out there: "forced to take on a new UI paradigm" is code speak for "creating your own ideas". Something OOO, with their "follow the leader" design model, has not displayed any ability for.

Nothing was stopping OOO from creating an innovative new interface. Aside from their own inability to innovate, of course.

The Best Option: Support Both

[EXTomar]

For User Interface, the best option is to let the user decide. When the user feels like they are in control, they embrace the application. If a user can make sense of this "ribbon style" of application control, why shouldn't Open Office give it to them? Even saying that this feature shouldn't come at the cost of hosing over those who think that a minimalist, classic style menu works best for them. A user should be able to use Open Office in either style but the goal is still the same: being productive.

One of the big points of Open Source is to empower the user. Instead of making draconian decisions about this sort of stuff as edicts handed down from the mountain at Redmond, Open Office should be allowing users to pick any style. Their is value in making Open Office look and behave like Office 2007 or like Lotus 1-2-3 or like any number of other configurations out there. Being able to give the users a choice is what is supposed to be an advantage against Microsoft.

Access DB size...

[alexhs]

Thanks for the tip.

The key word

[camperdave]

it just states that competitors can't use their Ribbon interface.

The key word is "their", as in it just states that competitors can't use THEIR Ribbon interface.

IBM -- OPEN SOURCE 1-2-3!!! NOW!!!

[scottsk]

Doesn't Microsoft get it? Most users are click-trained on Office. If you move a single icon, they are unable to use the product any longer. If you put this new re-GUI-ed office on a person's computer, they'll be catatonic. I mean, I have seen many users who learn exact, step-by-step procedures. They don't explore. They don't adapt. Revamping the entire UI is a bad idea - people will flee to OpenOffice.

If IBM had any sense at all, they'd open source Lotus 1-2-3 immediately -- there are millions of people who still remember / commands and @ functions who would abandon MS Office in a heartbeat to go back to the old, familiar software. I mean, if Borland can re-launch Turbo, why can't IBM re-launch 1-2-3? I know for a fact it once ran on UNIX - can you imagine what would happen if a character-mode 1-2-3 was available with all the old keystrokes and functions? People would flock to Linux. Does anyone at IBM actually remember they own 1-2-3?

Answering a question

[Anonymous Coward]

"Will traditional menus/toolbars hold up to an ever-increasing number of features"
No, because they consume space needed for the actual work area. However, a modified form or these things could work. For example, if a menu the pops up is scrollable, then the number of features on the menu can be enormous. And a toolbar that is clickable (the BAR is clickable) and fills the screen with tool icons, which all disappear when you select one, would be a way to have only one toolbar.

Skins!

[Anonymous Coward]

Good point. If OOo were skinnable, any anonymous coward could write a Ribbon Skin. There... no infringement on OOo's part (assuming the ribbon *concept* can even be considered protected IP in the first place), but if users demand ribbons, they're free to have `em.

GUI consistency is overrated

[I'm Don Giovanni]

First, Office hasn't used standard Windows widgets since at least Office 97.
Second, GUI consistency used to be considered a plus, but now is recognized as overrated. This is because of the Web. People are used to browsing sites that have wildly different UIs and they're able to adapt to them without much problem.

Microsoft know Office has something to fear...

[thekm]

There was recent news out of Redmond that they were finding it hard to convince users that the upgrade to the latest Office suite is worth the money. This is because they know that back in 2000 they had a word processor that was more than good enough for 95% of users. All the rest are teeny weeny productivity improvements that anyone that spends less than X hours a day using will simply not appreciate.

It's like photoshop 5 compared to the latest versions... mostly productivity that only pros can truly make great use of (e.g. editing text as text is only handy if you're doing design revisions and have clients that have flip-floppy minds). Otherwise, P5 really is better than what most people need.

But to this end, OO.o really is more than what is needed by 95% of users. MS knows this too. For these reasons, Office has a fight on its hands from here in.

...there's not too many ways to reinvent the creation of a text based document that remains relevant to all that use it.

"Ribbon" is not new

[moria]

Except for the name. It's nothing more than a tabbed toolbar, right? Bluefish has also been using similar design for years. http://bluefish.openoffice.nl/screenshots/main_win .png

Re:I think we've had too much license as it is!

[Da_Weasel]

I know, I know....ignore the off topic trolls...i'm sorry but I had to offer some rebuttal....

Hitler was a Roman Catholic, baptized into that religious institution as an infant in Austria. He became a communicant and an altar boy in his youth and was confirmed as a "soldier of Christ" in that church.

Hitler seeking power, wrote in Mein Kampf, "... I am convinced that I am acting as the agent of our Creator. By fighting off the Jews. I am doing the Lord's work."

Yea ummm...he sounds like a real secular atheist to me! Dinesh D'Souza is an idiot. He has an amazing gift for writing, but unfortunately no gift thinking.

Most useless license ever?

[NatteringNabob]

I mean, really, what good is this? I'm guessing the intent is to have third parties integrate with Office provide the same look and feel, but is a license agreement really needed for this? Couldn't they have just released the toolkit as part of MSDN? Most likely it is yet another attempt by MS to show the EU that they are committed to 'openness' without actually providing any kind of useful interoperability with potential competitors.

Pure marketing without meat

[msobkow]

if you are building a program which directly competes with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, or Access (the Microsoft applications with the new UI), you can't obtain the royalty-free license.'

So if you are doing word processing, document editing, email, calendars, diagramming, data storage/database, reporting, presentations, or anything else useful for end-users, there is no royalty-free option.

If you are doing a Mickey Mouse IM, media player, or something else that can't generate revenue due to widespread competition, feel free to implement a UI that is incompatible with any platform other than Windows. (See above.)

Read what is said, people, not what you want to hear.

Re:Pure marketing without meat

[msobkow]

This whole concept got me thinking about UI history overall. Let's take a romp through history of some of the UI advancements over the decades:

Function Labels
Old-school "green screen" standards such as IBM's user interface guidelines included the use of label displays for function keys (where supported by hardware), standardization of keystroke actions such as "ALT-F4" closing a window, and recommendations for font highlighting to indicate mandatory/optional data, read/write access, primary keys, etc. "ALT-F4" works to this day in virtually every GUI there is.

Text Menus
Part of the fundamental UI models going back as far as function keys with screen labels, if not farther.

Spreadsheet Interface
Dan Briklin's Visicalc. 'nuff said. The man never did get reasonable financial rewards for what he did.

Edit Regions
Text boxes have been around as long as green screens, as well as field validation. They're just fancier now.

Drop-down Menus
Not quite as old as the green screen, these were a display-saving alternative to screens listing menu options. Power users would just enter a dot-suffix navigation of menu options: 1.3.5.8 might fire up an "Add Customer" screen, for example.

Pop-up Menus
I think these started with X-11, maybe even Xerox PARC. Certainly it was a key feature of Motif and OpenLook, which preceded MS Windows substantially. They were also present in the Amiga UI, several years before even Windows 3.1 was released.

Audio Feedback
ANSI7 defines CTRL-G as bell. Some form of ping, alert, sound effect, or other attention-getting audio signal has been around since the teletypewriter. WAVs and MP3s are just fancier ways of doing the same thing that applications have done since the Commodore PET and Apple II.

Images and Icons
How far back does the BMP go? Higher resolution, compressed, even primitive animations via GIF go back much farther than any GUI. Once upon a time, only an image viewer displayed an image, not the UI.

Drawers
Drawers of icons have been around at least since Motif.

Toolbars
Tear-aside and pinnable menus have been around since at least OpenLook. Whether icons are displayed beside, above, below, under, or to the right of a text label, the metaphor is far from new.

Wizards
I laughed myself silly when someone years ago presented the "Wizard" as a "new" way of doing things. Ever enter a timesheet on an old mainframe form application? GECOS email (I think that's what it was called)? Wizards are just old fashioned step-by-step forms prettified.

Bubble Help
Green screens would display a help line to the bottom or top of the screen. Dialogue-box help showed up with the green screen as well. Even vi and emacs had help systems, though they weren't triggered by the now-common F1. Pretty laughable that anyone thought the particular shape of the dialogue box displaying the text was important, isn't it?

Mouse Gestures
The idea was around for a long time. I think I even saw prototypes of pie menus for the Amiga or the Mac, but I'm not sure. Pie selection is closely related to gestures -- select via stroke direction instead of precise mouse placement. Interesting, but not comfortable for everyone.

3D User Interface
SGI. 'nuff said.

Personally, I can't imagine paying royalties to use the idea of a Motif icon/menu drawer opening sideways. It's kind of obvious.

IOW: MS == Hypocrites

[denis-The-menace]

THEY can ..er.. copy the MAC UI, get sued by Apple and win, in the 80s.
However, you can't do the same with MS's UI, in the 00s.

Re:IOW: MS == Hypocrites

[squiggleslash]

Honestly, nothing they released in the 1980s was remotely Mac like. Until Windows 2.0, Microsoft Windows didn't even support overlapping windows. Icons existed but had an entirely different function (to represent minimized windows, rather than files as in Mac OS.) Microsoft did collaborate with HP at one point on a desktop called NewWave, the earliest version technically came out in the eighties, but that's in 1989, and it wasn't a Microsoft product, and was never part of Windows.

Funnily enough, Windows up until Mac OS 6 was actually more capable than Mac OS, even if the UI was (much) less friendly. Mac OS 6 had the Multifinder, and at that point the integration was good enough to allow Mac OS users to have more or less the same power as Windows users. So not only did Microsoft produce a different system, it excelled in areas different from those that Mac OS excelled in.

Even Windows 95 borrows only slightly from Mac OS. It has a (half-hearted attempt at a) "spacial" file manager, and icons on the desktop represent files, not windows. And, erm, that's it. Yeah.

Re:IOW: MS == Hypocrites

[cloricus]

The question I ask is are these slight borrowings defining or not. For example I look at our Vista test boxen next to our XP sp2 boxes and I simply see a poor expose` clone on top of XP with a poor attempt to change the UI 'just enough'(tm) to get the general user to believe it is any different. So they've only taken a few features like the dashboard, alt tabbing that doesn't suck (but seriously who still uses alt tab when you have f10 under Mac and Lin now?), and some glitter from around the place yet they get an OS that will impress far to many and make them a lot of money. I'm not saying this is right or wrong or that mac has never taken Windows features - I'm just saying that even taking the odd feature still makes a big difference like it did back in 95.

OpenOffice

[supertunaman]

Well OpenOffice isn't being sold. So it obviously is NOT a competitor. Besides, isn't $100 billion enough for Bill Gates?

Honestly?

[jpellino]

From what I can see with progressing versions of Office - much of the UI is "neato", but I have yet to see any real productivity gains or or truly innovative means to get work done than I can in - oh - Appleworks. I'm not talking as a fanboy here, but as someone who works in an education lab, and watches room after room of people who just want to get something done struggle with where that command is or what this button really does. Didn't an MS rep nearly lead MW Expo in prayer while showing how the new Office could now keep a chart on a single printed page? This is groundbreaking?
We use Neo Office as well for student machines and still have a half dozen of us who pay for the current version of MS office. OO et.al. could do well to branch from the current UI canon for Office and look to do it better. I'd start with things like more keyboard equivalents for common tasks (this is a sore point with MS Office) and more thought-out menu heirarchies.
You're aping a company that still thinks that pressing "start" to stop is perfectly normal. There's plenty of room for improvement.

Re:Honestly?

[camperdave]

I'm not familiar with Appleworks, so I cannot comment on that. However, after watching the video, I think that they've done a major improvement to Office. It's not just the ribbon. The ribbon is just a horizontal status bar that shows a context sensitive menu. The real change is that they've reorganized the menus so that accessing a particular function is less clicks away. Just like a style sets multiple parameters on a paragraph, you now have the ability to set multiple parameters on all sorts of objects in a document. You don't have to fumble around with a color chooser to try to find the right colors to make your table look pretty. There are plenty of color themes with aesthetically correct palettes from which to choose. Basically, you tell the computer what to do, and you don't have to futz around with the details of how to do it. The other feature is that you can preview the effects of these different styles on the document dynamically. As you scroll through the options you see the effect that the option would have on your document, rather than having to commit the change, then undo it, then try the next option.

Of course, the biggest change that nobody seems to be mentioning - No more Clippy!

I've used Office 2007 for 3 days now

[fluor2]

I've used Vista (Business version) and Office 2007 for 3 days now. Both at work and home.

All I say is that the new UI is in fact VERY similar to the interface at The Google "Docs & Spreadsheets" interface. It's so similar that I really ask how they could patent such a thing.

And by the way, what I really used to love about Microsoft products was that I always found logic places of "getting that function I look for". Now I'm lost clicking everywhere for like everything I look for. It's VERY clicky, and I already fear for people that have to start using their mouse more intensively than before. Some functions are hidden like beyond recognition (like you only find them at a little notice below the Save As filename).

I respect google for making their choice, since it's more compatible with Ajax or whatever, but Office 2007 UI is neither original nor user friendly.

Re:The myth of OS X GUI consistency.

[Millenniumman]

Those are really just color/"theme" changes. They don't function any differently, although there are some applications that do.

UI is a cosmetic

[Jrabbit05]

DOS TEXT FTFW But serriously, its only to cover up the code.

Then Copy the Office on Mac UI

[metalligoth]

The user interface on Office for the Mac (Office X and Office 2004) has this thing called the formatting palette, which is rather similar to the ribbon but I guess was a little ahead of it's time. I could see OpenOffice using the formatting palette without infringing on any patents, and still looking as crisp and up-to-date as Office 2007.

I've used both Office for Mac and Office 2007 (quite in depth, on both accounts) and I really think that this would be a great way for OpenOffice to come out the victor. The learning curve from Office 2003 -> OpenOffice wouldn't be as steep as Office 2003 - 2007, and you'd still get all the benefits of the "ribbon" UI.

My take on MSO 2007

[BytePusher]

I took a look at Microsoft Office. Running under VMWare on a 3 year old system, it was much faster than any other Office, even going back to '97. That's the extent of the good. The user interface is overwhelming and I mean that in the negative sense. At once you can see over a dozen different typefaces, and more attention grabbing graphics than I have attention for. Everything was shifting and changing colors without actually pushing a button. Just scrolling the mouse is deemed enough intent to make major visual changes to the interface. Office 2007 is a nightmare for anyone with even mild ADD or ADHD. That said, if there is a toned down version for us children over 18 who will actually be using the product it could be a very nice interface.

Excellent news for open source

[nitecoder]

It will be great for opensource if licensing UI features becomes prevalent. GPL and all of the other licenses will work just as well for design elements as it does for functions and libraries. If you create an original UI element, you just attach a license to it that requires any other UI element in the same program to be freely licensable under the same terms.

some gift...

[godless dave]

Since the Office 2007 UI sucks, why would anyone else want to use it in their software?

Design patents are pretty useless here

[dilute]

Yeah, Microsoft files them, but design patents on visual screen elements are all limited to being used in conjunction with display hardware (meaning you the user may infringe but the software provider only "contributes" to the infringement which is a tougher case, and as widely discussed, it would be nuts for Microsoft to sue users). Furthermore, the scope of a design patent isn't very broad - i.e., where the "ornamental" impression is changed. It surely doesn't cover any ribbon interface, per se. The say they have utility patents pending as well -- well, let's see 'em , they may not be that broad either. As Apple proved, copyright won't get you too far on this. Nor will trade dress. In sum, this is not a very strong fence of protection. Another bluff that will be called and recede into distant memory.

This looks like the Blender UI

[Anonymous Coward]

Have a look at the Blender UI.

It has a very powerful tabbed panel approach which looks like the Office 2007 UI ( but built for a more techincal audience). http://www.blender.org/cms/Features.155.0.html

You can turn on and off panels within the "ribbon" as well as combine panels into tabbed panels by simple dragging the panels around. It's all "animated" as well - other panels shift around to accomodate. Impressive technically.

As a side note: who in the heck would sign a license limiting their options just to see what Microsoft thinks a good UI design is! Isn't Apple much more recognized in this area? Apple's guidelines don't require a license to read: http://developer.apple.com/documentation/UserExper ience/Conceptual/OSXHIGuidelines/index.html

When people talk about X....

[Anonymous Coward]

These days, when people refer to "X", it's not just in the sense of a plain X server. They're referring to the popular toolkits, including Motif, GTK+ and Qt. To some extent they're even talking about a desktop environment, possibly KDE, GNOME, XFCE or even CDE.

Yes, it's technically correct to say that X does not provide any sort of widgets beyond a window. But these days, such a setup is pretty fucking useless for most people. That's why you'll find libraries like GTK+ and Qt on most systems. The X experience is rather shitty without them.

So be a dick all you want, and live in your little fantasy world where "X" only means a running X server. For the rest of us, those of us in the real world who actually use our systems to get real work done, "X" now consists of much more than just a plain X server. It also includes a few toolkits that the community as a whole has standardized upon.

Ribbons?

[RealGrouchy]

All this talk of the ribbon UI, and yet no useful links to describe what it is/looks like.

Sigh.

- RG>

Re:Ribbons?

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a link to Microsoft:
http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowPost.aspx? PostID=525938&SiteID=17

On that page is another link:
http://www.runaware.com/microsoft/en-us/office2007 /td

Better than a screenshot, but you'll prolly need to be using Windows/IE to get any joy out of it. Nice though

Behind the 8-ball because of a data format

[SgtChaireBourne]

... have you ever tried to generate an excel document with charts without using an office object? can't really be done in a secure (read: won't potentially crash your IIS box) manner due to needing office installed. in an environment where reports (excel, ppt, word) are generated by a site this is priceless.

You're stuck in that position because of the file format and wouldn't be in that position if

1. Third party tools had access to the complete file format specification so the actually could generate an 'excel document {sic}' with charts. That's not gonna happen with existing formats and the licensing questions about MOOX / DOCX suggest future replacement formats out of Redmond may not help out so much with that.
   
   ... or ...
   
   
2. There was a universal format that included spreadsheets (aka 'excel documents') and charts, etc.

The solution's been visible for a long time. It's only lately that it's been within grasp.

Re:Behind the 8-ball because of a data format

[discojohnson]

i think we'll just have to agree to disagree. you say to use an open document structure so anyone can use it, yay! i say microsoft is in the position to dictate formats because they're the industry leader (regardless of how they got there), which includes even CSS renderings (and opinions are like buttholes). if microsoft had some sort of incentive to support an open format, then maybe they would. and you know what, if it wasn't microsoft then it'd just be some other private company running the show (be it apple, ibm, etc). microsoft is in the business to make money. don't fault them for doing that. as it is, human beings are pretty predictable which is why i say that if you were microsoft you'd never be where it is today with the attitude of universal formats. few businesses would be worth a damn if they just freely gave out everything that requires some form of keeping things away from the general populous (recipes from hostess, rdbms code from oracle, brass mixtures for cymbal makers, etc). free market--compete! or shut up and color with the rest of those that wish they had a piece of the pie. all of those on the list, from what i could tell, are linux/oss supporters, including google--and it appears that no one there benefits in the pocketbook from having an open format...with names like Open Enterprise Solutions or City of Bloomington i don't see how these folks want closed source anything. i did see IBM and Unisys on the list, but they know they're not in position to dictate anything in regards to document formats (and i sure as hell don't see IBM giving out the source code for their mainframe software--please correct me if i'm wrong). all those on the list stand to save money by having oss products to do their documents in, so as to not pay money to microsoft in terms of licensing fees for microsoft office. /rant

I wrote a response here

[Rudd-O]

but it was too long, so I just blogged about it: Of licenses, Microsoft Office, and user interfaces

New Interface

[Oshkoshjohn]

I, for one, plan to welcome our Microsoft overlords into my home and office, just like last time!

What is the patent

[Anonymous Coward]

After watching the video I suspect what they're patenting is

1) The fact that the widgets resize and shrink when you resize the app
2) and maybe the drop down widgets that appear when the app is resized
3) the little floating toolbar that fades in over the text when you type something

just my guess

open standards help closed source, open source

[SgtChaireBourne]

i say microsoft is in the position to dictate formats because they're the industry leader (regardless of how they got there)...microsoft is in the business to make money. don't fault them for doing that ...

I was wondering when the shills would come back to fight against the free market.

No one is faulting M$ for "making money". The fault the public finds is the same thing the courts on both sides of the Altantic have found fault with: predatory marketing and abusing its monopoly positions in some markets to establish new monopolies in new markets. In short, M$ apparently cannot compete in a free market and appears to do everything within it's influence, legal or otherwise, to stifle or eradicate a free market economy (or any competition at all) in the markets it sells in.

That's been the business model since the 1980's: M$ has leveraged the desktop monopoly Bill's mom got him from IBM into one for web browsers, productivity software / formats, and online audiovideo software / formats. It's that middle one, productivity software/formats, that's relevant here. If M$ had even documented it's office formats, there would be no need for the establishing a universal office format like OpenDocument. Without documentation, competitors are easily marginalized or even run out of that market, and of course without documentation it is darn near impossible for new entrants.

It's not about open source. Closed source and open source can both be used in conjunction with open standards to make loads of money. Yes, the Internet and the web were invented using open source and run mostly on open source, but this is all about open standards, which is a different thing.

Without open standards you would not have e-mail (SMTP/ASCII), the WWW (HTTP/HTML) or the Internet (TCP/IP). Nor would you have single sign-on authentication (Kerberos/LDAP), nor even long distance telephone service - not even land line, let alone mobile service. Not even would you have iPods or other "mp3 players", all of which are dependent on different components of MPEG. The list goes one. And, without open standards for productivity software, you end up in a situation with no free market there.

Nokia Chair, Jorma Ollila, praises open standards

[SgtChaireBourne]

Hit submit too soon. Here's a quote on open standards (bold emphasis mine) from the Chairman of Nokia's Board of Directors, Jorma Ollila, a dyed-in-the-wool capitalist:

"... The example of Internet today strengthens the belief that Nokia has held for a long time: Open standards and platforms create a foundation for success. They enable interoperability of technologies and encourage innovativeness and healthy competition, which in turn increases consumer choice and opens entirely new markets,"
From - http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/061122/ukw015.html?.v= 70

Everyone benefits from Open Standards, even M$, but it would then lose it's monopoly, it would still be able to compete and, if the product is good, make money. The main reason that M$ fights, is probably that the number one rule when you have a monopoly is to preserve that monopoly at any cost. If you keep the monopoly, then those expenditures in capital or political capital can still be recovered. If you lose the monopoly then you have to work like every other company.

Maybe a little competition would be good. Look at the kick in the pants MS-DOS 4 got when DR-DOS started to eat its lunch. Or MSIE when Firefox showed up. The radical changes to MS Office 2007 suggest that OpenOffice.org is making its presence known. We'll see. But, again, for there to be competition there have to be open standards.

First one

[Anonymous Coward]

All your ribbon are belong to us