bal01

Microsoft Office is going the way of HTML editor FrontPage and dissolving into disaster. FrontPage, before being bought by Microsoft, was one of the most powerful of WYSIWYG Web design tools. Slowly but surely, Microsoft made the product clumsy and unusable until it simply had to abandon the project. Microsoft is gradually doing this to Office, too.

I'm going to target Microsoft Word as the prime example. The decline began with Office 2007 and the so-called ribbon interface, a block of symbols across the top. The problems are best described in a Wikipedia entry on ribbon computing: