Death is Uncool

During PDC 2005, Microsoft previewed the UI for Office 12. It sure cleared up the question/worry of “whatever happened to a proper menu bar in Windows Vista’s Explorer”: As Gates said, the menu bar is dead.

I remember the last “death announcement”: it came from Steve Jobs regarding Mac OS 9, and it made perfect sense.

Bill Gates’s announcement, on the other hand, doesn’t. Decades and billions of UI research, it appears, are void now, just because one software manufacturer mistakes their radical UI change for a “big step forward”. A big step forward, for Microsoft, would be to at long last treat the menu bar properly, which they never did. They cluttered it with unimportant functions, then, upon realizing that, added features such as “personalization” that boiled down to shortening the menu bar and making it even more confusing.

The lesson learnt should have been: we cannot get this UI element right; maybe we should hire people who can. Instead, they decided to ditch the element and replace it with, uh, a panel combining buttons, links and other widgets in such a confusing, cluttered way as to make UI zealots cringe.

My worry is that other developers will eventually pick this horrible idea up and transition it from Windows Vista to KDE; perhaps even GNOME.

Too bad, really — the menu bar was a fascinating concept for its simplicity.