Microsoft and the de-menuing of everything

by Jordan Running Nov 2nd 2005

PC World's Techlog has an interesting piece about Microsoft's impending elimination of the menubar in its products. We've talked about the new "ribbon" toolbar in Office 12 before, but PC World's Editor in Chief Harry McCracken has points out examples of this "de-menuing" all over Microsoft's Vista products. His main complaint, though he issues a disclaimer that Microsoft will undoubtedly be tweaking things a lot before Vista and Office 12's releases, is that it's all so inconsistent. Some apps still have conventinal menus, some have eliminated them entirely but introduce wildly different toolbar schemes, some take only half-measures to hide their menus..

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Victor Agreda, Jr. said 7:55PM on 11-02-2005

Well, it could be worse. They do like Apple and defy their own guidelines (oh wait, MS does that too), or make every app with a different UI so they all look like they were acquired by a team of drunks pub-crawling on a Friday night...

Ted said 8:38AM on 11-03-2005

This means trouble for people who use screen reading software as a solution for low- and no-vision. Menus are easy to navigate, especially after you learn the alt + whatever shortcuts. Graphics are a pain unless properly labeled.And then they can still be a pain.

Randy said 10:58AM on 11-03-2005

The more things change... Solaris did this nearly ten years ago on their GUI desktop - when I saw the Microsoft version of the dashboard I got this incredible sense of deja vu. Interesting that they (Microsoft) decided to go with that paradigm after all this time.

Randy said 12:50PM on 11-03-2005

submachine said 12:08PM on 11-04-2005

The more things change...the more difficult it is to re-learn them.

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