The other thing the ribbon is missing is simplicity.
I can navigate the entire menu system by clicking the menu and then moving my mouse around. Same thing with the keyboard - I can activate a menu and then browse the whole thing with just the arrow keys. You can't do either of those with the ribbon.
The ribbon is nice for touch interfaces, but they should have made it also act like the menu system (as noted above). I bet the only reason they didn't do that is because they wanted to patent the ribbon as something new - http://patents.stackexchange.com/questions/6074/prior-art-re...
I can navigate the entire menu system by clicking the menu and then moving my mouse around. Same thing with the keyboard - I can activate a menu and then browse the whole thing with just the arrow keys. You can't do either of those with the ribbon.
The ribbon is nice for touch interfaces, but they should have made it also act like the menu system (as noted above). I bet the only reason they didn't do that is because they wanted to patent the ribbon as something new - http://patents.stackexchange.com/questions/6074/prior-art-re...