I don't think those are completely valid counter examples. Sure you can fire any one of them up and start using them for the most basic task for which they're suited, but to really interact with them takes time and learning.
Just an anecdote: I work in a computer lab for these type of new users, and after being trained for many years to go to a file menu, the round button that serves as a menu access in Word 2010 trips a lot of people up. I get tons of "Where's the print button?" questions.
Yeah, that's why I picked 2010. In 2010 the File menu is no longer the round button like in 2007; it is labeled "File" again. And, it is pretty clever, especially regarding printing; print preview is build right into the print dialog box and updated in real time as you change options. It's already saved me time & paper.
Each cycle, Microsoft does usability tests with new users doing moderately complex stuff. One of their designers did a series of blog posts and videos about their approach to usability and usability testing for Office 2007 that was really interesting. The whole point of the Ribbon UI for Office 2007 and later was to make it easier for users to discover and use the advanced features of Office without training.
> I don't think those are completely valid counter examples
Yes they are ... "really interacting with them" is not their purpose.
You can open an Excel spreadsheet even if you haven't done so in your life and only have experience using Word ... you can move around, search for text, change styles, print. That's because it uses common interface elements that have been used for years.
Yes, Office 2010 brings interface changes, but it's nothing to worry about ... once you clicked the round button once, you'll learn its position. It took me a whole week to not trip over C-x C-s in Emacs, or to remember C-x C-c, and I had to setup my own shortcuts for common stuff (like C-w which deletes the previous word ... as in Vim, because even if my life depended on it, I couldn't learn the Emacs shortcut). And I still don't know how to print from Emacs.
We are talking about technically-inclined people here. Textmate is a lot more intuitive to use ... I'm still using Emacs because it is much more powerful, but boy what a painful experience it was the first months.
Yeah, my wife took a c++ class and that's what I showed her to use. She didn't know any shortcuts but could move around and code with no problems using only the arrow keys on the keyboard and the menus. (On a Ubuntu machine no less.)
If you do not have a Unix machine, thanks to virtualization they are now easy to set up without risking a heart attack in a normal user:
Just fire up a VirtualBox, and install Ubuntu in there. The hardest part about a Linux installation is most often the partitioning--but you can just use the whole virtual disk.
Or you just download a pre-installed image of a VM.
The Google system is immensely complex, involving thousands of machines distributed through several continents. Somehow I manage to interact with it by typing a few words...
Just an anecdote: I work in a computer lab for these type of new users, and after being trained for many years to go to a file menu, the round button that serves as a menu access in Word 2010 trips a lot of people up. I get tons of "Where's the print button?" questions.