From the Vaults: The Office Ribbon (Premium)

In 2005, I learned about Microsoft’s secret plan to revolutionize the Office user interface with something called the ribbon.

It was controversial from the get-go, with many avid Office users arguing that Microsoft had ruined the software they used every day. But I saw what Microsoft was trying to accomplish. And I still applaud this effort to transform the user interface of a mature productivity suite that many thought, even then, was tired, old, and unchangeable.

So let’s go back to the beginning.

Jensen Harris, who worked under Julie Larson Green and Steven Sinofsky at Office and then later at Windows, pulled me aside ahead of PDC 2005 to show me a very early version of the ribbon.

Why did he do this?

According to Jensen, I was the reason he had gotten a job at Microsoft in the first place. As a very young man, he had written an add-in for Microsoft Outlook (either 97 or 98) that allowed it to work more seamlessly with Internet email. (Outlook was focused on Microsoft’s on MAPI email at the time.) I wrote about this add-in, and it came to the attention of the person who ran the Outlook team at the time. He directed an underling to “hire that guy,” which they did.

Anyway, Jensen and I sat down in the lounge area in the front of the cavernous Los Angeles Convention Center (LACC), and he opened the lid of his laptop while looking around to make sure no one was looking over our shoulders. And there it was. The ribbon, in prototype form, in Office 12.

And it was rough. There were no icons at that time, so each command was represented by a square, circle, triangle, or other shape. Microsoft was working on the real icons, he said.

Jensen told me that the point of the ribbon was Microsoft’s growing frustration with commend density in the Office products. Everyone had seen those hilarious images of Microsoft Word with every single possible toolbar turned on, leaving a postage-stamp-sized area for writing. The products had simply outgrown the original menu- and toolbars-based UI that dated back to the 1980’s, he said.

And it wasn’t just command density. Jensen also introduced me to the term “lipstick on a pig.” With each Office version to date, Microsoft had to change small things in the UI so that someone looking over a user’s shoulder could immediately tell which version of Office they were using. This was called lipstick on a pig, he said. And it was required because the UIs would otherwise be nearly identical. It would be like trying to tell the year of a Volkswagen Beetle.

As Jensen told it, Green and Sinofsky were immediately behind the idea of revolutionizing the Office user interface, which was unexpected given the maturity of the products. The issue, of course, was how one might do so given the ingrained nature of menus and toolbars.

At the time, too, Microsoft’s competitors were aping the Office user interface. Commercial products (like WordPerfect) and open source projects (OpenOffice) alike offered Microsoft Office “modes” in which they imitated the look and feel of the dominant products.

So not only did Microsoft need to come up with something new that worked better, the solution had to be something its competitors could not copy. (As you may recall, Microsoft did, of course, “open up” the ribbon to third parties. But in the beginning, at least, there was a stipulation that competitors could not copy the look and feel of Microsoft’s own ribbon-using products.)

There was more. The UIs created and used by Office often ended up in Windows later, and in this way, the Office UX team worked as a sort of incubator for potential Windows UIs at a time when Windows was still the center of Microsoft’s world (and worldview). For example, the Office team was the first to come up with the command bars that replaced old-school toolbars in Windows. So another goal for the ribbon was that it should be good enough to be used in Windows, too. (Which it was: The ribbon came to WordPad, Paint, and the File Explorer over time.)

The central genius of the ribbon, as Jensen explained it, was that it solved the command density problem in Office by making commands more discoverable than before. The ribbon used tabs —no more endless scrubbing through menus—and what were essentially double-height toolbars to place more commands closer at hand. With no menus at all. The idea was that the user would see more commands at once, and that those commands they couldn’t see would be more easily found under obvious tab names.

Sensing the user revolt to come—some still hate the ribbon—Microsoft decided right away not to continue providing and updating the old menu and toolbars UI in Office. It just would have been a support nightmare, I was told. And the firm felt like it had found the right approach.

Today, over a decade later, Microsoft is revising the ribbon to what it calls a “simplified ribbon.” It’s really just a tabbed toolbar, and a UI that first debuted years ago in the Office Mobile apps. But things have changed: The competition is now mostly free and web-based, like Google Docs, and this new UI is perhaps better oriented for that competition. Too, this isn’t as dramatic, given the way the world has changed. Back in 2005, what Microsoft was doing impacted us all. Today, fewer people even care about this kind of thing anymore.

Well, I still care. And while the influence of both Microsoft and Office are indeed diminished, it’s interesting to me that the firm is still working to make its core productivity offering more efficient. And doing so literally 25 years after I first started using Office.