Why I hate ribbons

Ribbons are those fancy new toolbars of Microsoft Office 2007. I read an article a longer time ago from Microsoft telling that they did some survey before the release of Office 2007 to ask people what features they would like to have in the next versions. And it turned out that a very lot of features the people were asking were already there in 2003. This made them think about why the users didn't find those features that are already there. And that made them redesign the user interface.

In my opinion they made the first error already there: An application that offers many features can't be mastered fully by everybody. And people often do things as they were used to for many years. The only thing you can try is to get a good structure how your features are sorted and organized in the application so that people intuitively find what they are looking for - if they would look up (and many don't - just when you ask them what features they would like to have they start inventing and thinking).

• Ribbon bars are no guarantee for a well structured organization of program features.
  And indeed, Microsoft didn't organize many things well. For instance I do not know why the macros are under "View".
  
  
• Ribbons take more space than normal menus and toolbars.
  This might not be very important for big screen resolutions but when I use bigger resolutions and larger monitors I want to reduce the window size to see more windows and not one window bigger.
  
  
• Buttons are different sizes and according to Murphy's law those I need are tiny and those I don't are huge.
  Microsoft (or the appropriate software designers) decided about the size of particular icons in the bar. They adapted it to the desires of the mean user. But who is the mean user? This is a person that in reality does not exist. And so some button sizes can fit for some users.
  
  
• Ribbons are a replacement for toolbars and not a replacement for menus.
  When introducing ribbons Microsoft dropped the pull-down menus. But on the ribbons only a few features are displayed and many are hidden behind a very tiny button on the lower right. If they would just have dropped the old toolbars for the ribbons then I would have understood more.
  
  
• Buttons are not general in line.
  The buttons on the ribbons are not always ordered next to each other. Some are left and right others are above and below. This makes it more difficult for the user to get along.
  
  
• Ribbons are not customizable.
  Older Office versions had completely customizable toolbars. With the introduction of the ribbons this feature has completely gone.
  

These were just the general issues with ribbons and I am not talking about things that are Microsoft specific. For instance that behind the tiny buttons on the lower left you get to the old dialogs so that the ribbons are only facade.

Just a side note: There are free Ribbon components for Java (Flamingo) available (and I guess also for .NET although a quick search on Google only showed up commercial variants). So it is not a matter of inability to create such a GUI why I don't like them.