Programming Windows: Ribbonized (Premium)

While Microsoft struggled to make sense of Windows Longhorn in 2005/6, the Office team was busy doing what it always did: shipping the next version of its flagship productivity suite right on schedule. The key to this Mussolini-like efficiency was a Mussolini-like autocrat named Steven Sinofsky, who had come up through the ranks at Microsoft after serving as Bill Gates’ technical assistant in the early 1990s.

Sinofsky had tried but failed to convince Gates of the importance of the Internet in late 1993, and in April 1994 he joined the newly established Office Product Unit as the director of program management, where he led the design of shared technologies in Office 95 and Office 97. He went on to lead the Office group, and he was eventually elevated to senior vice president as he oversaw the development of Office 2000, Office XP, Office 2003, and then Office 12/2007.

Sinofsky was always, in a word, divisive. A twitchy little man who bore a notable resemblance to JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, Sinofsky was hated by many at Microsoft but tolerated by CEOs Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, in turn, because of his ruthless efficiency. He was likewise respected and admired by those whose careers he advanced, most notably key lieutenant Julie Larson Green. Sinofsky and Green had worked together previously on Visual C++ and the horrific Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC), which should have been a warning to everyone involved. And during their years working on Office, Green had overseen the UI designs of Office XP, Office 2003, and Office 12/2007.

Sinofsky’s ability to ship major new Office versions on a regular cadence isn’t all that impressive in hindsight: Office 2000, Office XP, and Office 2003 were all iterative updates that had two major and unintended side-effects on the product family. First, customers had stopped upgrading because the new versions didn’t offer much in the way of new features. And second, the Office team was forced to arbitrarily change the UI of each version because they otherwise looked identical. This process was referred to internally as “putting lipstick on a pig.”

The UI enhancements in each new version were particularly minor. Office 2000, for example, featured controversial personalized menus and toolbars, where features one didn’t use would disappear to make the interface cleaner, but would also hide functionality. Office XP saw the debut of Smart Tags and task panes. And Office 2003’s biggest claim to fame was that Microsoft successfully split the suite into more product editions, a strategy it would later emulate in Windows Vista because customers gravitated to the more premium—and more expensive—editions.

For the next major version of Office, Microsoft planned to make some big changes by supporting key Longhorn/Windows Vista technologies and releasing the two products together. And it would finally take the painful step of thoroughly overhauling the Office user interface for the first time since the initial release of Excel for the Mac back in 1987. More on that in a moment.

In March 2005, I published the first substantive preview of Office 12, based on a major leak.

“Microsoft is plotting the path to Office 12, its next major Office version,” I wrote. “Office 12 will once again push collaboration features for businesses. It will arrive with a new range of Office-based servers. It will push the XML envelope even harder. But for Microsoft, the goal with Office 12 is more basic and more pressing than ever before. After years of lackluster upgrades and increased competition, Microsoft will seek to finally push its legacy users off of Office 97, fight the ‘good enough’ arguments, and try to deliver a suite that meets the needs of many, many market segments.”

My source provided a long list of coming changes in Office 12, though the coming UI changes were not among them. No matter: Steven Sinofsky emailed me—it was the first I had ever heard of the man—an ultimatum: take down the post, or Microsoft would send me an official cease and desist order. And so I did. Temporarily.

That May, we got our first hint of the coming UI changes when Bill Gates discussed Office 12 at Microsoft’s CEO Summit in May. “We’re making some changes in our user interface in Office to expose, make it easy to find the functionality, make it far more visual, [so] that you get all the power that’s there in the tool,” he said, awkwardly.

Then, in July, CRN published what I believe is the first mention of the term “ribbon,” a UI element that would replace the menus and toolbars/command bars of previous Office versions.

“Microsoft is working on a ‘ribbon’ concept in which the user would get a different strip or ribbon of icons depending on the task at hand—whether it’s a simple note, a fancy document, a graphical presentation, multimedia, or a spreadsheet, said a source familiar with the plans,” the CRN report noted. “That ribbon would expose only the tools relevant to the current job.”

The CRN report was also notable for cutting to the heart of the matter: yes, the Office UI had gotten bloated and unmanageable over the years. But Microsoft’s ulterior motive was giving customers a reason to upgrade after years of holding off. “Microsoft has a lot of Enterprise Agreements up for renewal, and Office is the reason most people renew,” a source told the publication. “If you’re looking into renewing for three years, they need to sell this thing now.”

Just days later, I saw my first evidence of this new ribbon UI as part of a set of images of Office 12. But the rest of the images looked like the traditional Office UI.

Microsoft formally unveiled the new ribbon UI at the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) 2005, which was held at the Los Angeles Convention Center (LVCC) in September. But the day before the keynote, I received an interesting email: Jensen Harris, who worked on Julie Larson Green’s UI team, asked if I’d be interested in an informal meeting that day. I was, of course, and we met at a coffee shop at the LVCC, where he showed me the ribbon interface on his laptop. We spent an incredible two hours discussing the new UI, which was still pretty bareboned in places, with placeholder icons, and didn’t represent the final look and feel. But he explained what Microsoft was trying to accomplish with this release.

The ribbon, he said, would solve the problem of “command density” in Office. Menus and toolbars made sense in a world in which Office only had dozens or maybe hundreds of commands. But as the products had grown more sophisticated and powerful over the years, the number of commands had grown almost exponentially, overpowering the interface. Microsoft had tried to solve this problem with stopgap measures, like those personalized menus and toolbars, but had failed. And he was particularly proud of the fact that the company had come up with a new interface for such a mature product, but he felt that users would also find it immediately familiar.

I loved it too, but I had one question: why on earth was he telling me about this before the show? As it turns out, Harris credited his job at Microsoft to me mentioning a utility he had written years earlier that had enabled Outlook 97, which had only supported Microsoft-style MAPI email, to also work with Internet email. An executive on the Office team had seen my write-up about this utility and directed an underling to find Harris and offer him a job. Which he did, and Harris accepted.

“The new tab-based paradigm presents ribbons of functions in place of the more typical menu and toolbars,” I later wrote of my first demo. “These ribbons are context-sensitive, meaning that features will be easier to find and relevant to what you’re currently working on. I came away from PDC excited and energized by what I had seen.”

The next day, on September 13, Microsoft corporate vice president Chris Capossela showed off Office 12 and its new ribbon UI to the public for the first time. Oddly, he never uttered the term “ribbon.” Instead, Microsoft was referring to it as a “results-oriented” interface.

“One of the things we focused on when building Office 12 was to help people get better results faster,” Capossela said during the Bill Gates opening PDC keynote. “When we shipped Word 1.0, the product had about 100 commands, so the menus and toolbars were a fine way to browse the product and learn about all those commands. Word 2003 has over 1,500 commands in it [and] 35 toolbars. That metaphor has just gotten completely overloaded when it comes to discovering the power of the product. In fact, in our research, when we ask people, ‘what would you like us to add in the next version of Office?’ 9 times out of 10, people have named [a feature] that is already in the product. They don’t know it’s there. It’s just too hard to find it.”

Starting with Microsoft Excel, Capossela displayed what he called “an innovative new UI” that he said was new but also felt familiar. It featured what looked like a very tall toolbar, full of icons and other UI, with a row of tabs on the top, like what one would see in a web browser. The first tab, called Sheet, contained “60 to 80 percent” of the commands that most users needed, he said. But you could also navigate to groups of other related commands by selecting other tabs—in Excel, they were named Insert, Page Layout, Formulas, Data, and Review—without “dropping down any menus.” Indeed, the only menu in the product was accessed via a Start-like button in the upper left. (This would later be named “the Office button.”) It was, he said, a much easier way to “explore the product.”

Intriguingly, this new UI would also be extensible, providing developers with yet another way to build solutions that ran directly inside of Office applications. But in Office 12, only some Office applications—like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint—would be upgraded to support this new UI, while others, like Outlook, would continue for now with the traditional menus and toolbars. (Outlook sub-windows did use the ribbon, however.).

On day two of PDC, Sinofsky took to the stage and announced Office 12 Beta 1, which would be provided to show attendees. Sinofsky was an awkward presence on stage, and not a natural public speaker, but he stepped through the Office developer opportunity, most specifically related to enterprise content management and extensibility. Microsoft had come to refer to Office as “the Microsoft Office System,” in part because it was such a broad set of solutions that extended from traditional clients like Windows to portable devices, servers, and cloud services.

In a video recorded just before the PDC and posted to Microsoft’s Scobleizer blog during the show, Julie Larson-Green said that the ribbon was a codename as she showed off the new user interface. She incorrectly referred to the tabs in Word 12 as “menus,” noting that there was nowhere else to go to look for commands. “There’s nothing hiding in a task pane somewhere, this is everything Word can do.” The ribbon, she said, was a “modeless way of interacting with the document.” Each ribbon was broken up into “functionality chunks, as we call them.”

“Most people can get going [with this new UI] immediately,” she noted. “To learn it all, it’s probably going to take a couple of weeks to get really familiar … we’re measuring that [learning] curve right now. We’re providing migration tools, “where did it go”-type [interfaces], customizable tutorials.”

In November, Microsoft released Office 12 Beta 1, giving “nominated customers and partners” a chance to check out its new results-oriented interface for the first time.

“Office ‘12’ will redefine the Office experience,” Mr. Capossela was quoted at the time. “The next version of Office is the most significant release in more than 10 years and includes new technologies designed to allow information workers to drive greater business success. Now, after many years of research and development, we’re eager to put the software to the test and solicit technical feedback from select customers and partners.”

In December, I had another meeting with Harris, this time on the record, along with Jacob Jaffe, a Group Product Manager on the Office team.

“We’re moving away from a commands-based interface, which is how you might think of Office 2003 and prior, to a results-oriented interface,” Jaffe said. “It’s designed to make features and functionality more accessible and more discoverable. It will also help users have confidence in terms of not only seeing those commands but also using them in the right way.”

“We’re actually engaged in a feature-naming process right now,” Jaffe said. “Ribbon is a codename. Each ribbon is comprised of groups [previously called ‘chunks’] and they can have galleries as well. We have a whole tiered approach to the UI, where specific elements can exist within the ribbon itself.”

In February 2006, Microsoft announced that Office 12 would come to market as the 2007 Microsoft Office System, and not as Office Vista, as some had feared. Everyone would simply call it Office 2007, of course. Like its predecessor, Office 2007 would ship in a bewildering array of SKUs, or product editions, Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007, Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2007, Microsoft Office Professional 2007, Microsoft Office Small Business 2007, Microsoft Office Standard 2007, Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007, and Microsoft Office Basic 2007, and each of the individual applications would also be made available separately. There would also be five Office servers, three of which were new to this generation.

In March, Microsoft issued an Office 2007 Beta 1 Tech Refresh (TR) that debuted the final UI for the product, which had switched from a dull gray to a more colorful light blue (or, at the user’s choice, a new dark mode). And one week later, it felt compelled to announce that Office 2007, unlike Windows Vista, would not see any delays.

“The company remains on track to complete work on the 2007 Microsoft Office system in October of this year and is planning to make the product available to the business customers through the volume licensing program in October 2006,” the short announcement noted. “Retail and OEM availability of the product is scheduled to coincide with the retail and OEM availability of the Windows Vista operating system in January 2007.”

A month later, Microsoft scheduled a two-day 2007 Microsoft Office System Beta 2 Reviewers Workshop for early May in New York City. Unfortunately, it was held in hard-to-get-to Brooklyn because the team wanted to try something different, but too many reviewers complained, and that was the last time they left Manhattan. Day one of the event would feature a Steven Sinofsky keynote, curiously timed to the end of the day, not the beginning. I was looking forward to meeting him.

My first in-person interaction with Steven Sinofsky did not go well.

When I entered the meeting space in the New York Marriott at the Brooklyn Bridge, I saw Mr. Sinofsky speaking with two other reviewers. So I walked up and waited for the right moment to just say hi. That moment never came. Instead, Sinofsky stopped speaking, eyed my name badge, and then looked me up and down slowly. Then he turned back to the other two people and just started talking again as if I wasn’t there. I think he was still upset about that initial leak.

Office 2007 Beta 2 shipped later that month, going out to over 3.5 million people. In sharp contrast to the Windows Vista dramas that were still unfolding at the time, there was little to say about Office 2007, though power users, especially, were still unsure about the ribbon and unhappy that Microsoft would not allow them to continue using the classic menus and toolbars instead. But I couldn’t understand this view.

“My feeling is that this new user interface is going to make Office experts out of a lot of people, since it’s so easy to find what you need know,” I wrote of Beta 2. “Better still, it’s much, much easier to discover functionality you likely didn’t know was in Office to begin with. I’m excited to see how people react to the new UI when Office 2007 finally ships publicly in early 2007.”

But Microsoft kept refining the UI based on feedback. In September, it revealed that it would issue a Beta 2 TR that would allow users to keep the ribbon minimized to free up space; if one moused over a tab, the ribbon would appear so they could access its commands.

Microsoft also refreshed the UI yet again, with new icons, an improved Office button and Quick Access toolbar, and a third color theme, silver.

By November, Office 2007—like Windows Vista, sort of—was ready for the public. It would launch for businesses alongside Vista on November 30. And then it would launch for consumers, again, alongside Vista, in January.

“I can’t recall ever being this genuinely excited about a Microsoft Office release,” I wrote of the product. “Office 2007 is one of those rare software releases that just nails it. This is the type of claim one typically hears about fun consumer electronics products from Apple Computer, not supposedly tired productivity applications from Microsoft. But Office 2007 is a home run, an absolutely stellar suite of tools that will benefit users of all types. Trust me on this one: unless you have absolutely no need to be more productive, you want Office 2007. And thanks to a larger-than-ever portfolio of Office suites at a variety of price points, you almost have no excuse for not jumping on the bandwagon. This is productivity squared.”

While Office 2007 came with other useful enhancements, the key reason for my excitement was the new ribbon UI.

“This radical and innovative new user interface completely refutes the notion that Microsoft’s productivity applications were so mature that there was literally no way to improve them further,” I raved. “Sure, the new ‘ribbon’-based UI in Office 2007 is nice to look at. But Office 2007 isn’t just a pretty face. The ribbonized user interface offers compelling and very real productivity enhancements to beginners and seasoned Office veterans alike, and that’s something worth cheering. My only complaint, really, is that Microsoft was only able to ribbonize the core Office applications. Maybe the rest will come on board in a future release.”

They would.

But the reason we’re discussing the ribbon here is that this interface would be made available more broadly in the future as well, outside of Office. With Jim Allchin retiring, Microsoft appointed Mussolini, er ah, Steve Sinofsky to head up future Windows development, starting with Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1). And Sinofsky brought Julie Larson-Green, Jensen Harris, and other key team members with him from Office over to Windows, and they had big ideas for future Windows user experiences.

The ribbon was coming to Windows.