The Ribbon of Life Has a Powerful Beat

I've just read Jakob Neilson expounding the virtues of "Microsoft's" "New" "What You Get Is What You See" usability initiative in Office (versus Apple's "What You See Is What You Get" concept). Along with many in the Windows world who have been treated to betas of Office 12, he has swallowed a good deal of kool-aid and come to a bunch of erroneous conclusions.

1. This is new (it isn't; heck the "bold" button in Word has always been a bold b)
2. This is one in the eye for Apple (KeyNote, Pages, several iApps, do this kind of thing already, and they do it better)
3. It works

I can't be bothered going into detail here, but first of all this is a step further down the path of obfuscating more efficient ways of using software (e.g., in the case of Word, using stylesheets) in favor of wasting huge amounts of space on fancy toolbars and palettes.

Ultimately, the trend (for both Apple and Microsoft) seems to be to produce a word processor with icons that create an entire "fill in the blanks" document, produced by a "design professional". So Word's icons might have something like a "Moby Dick" icon, where you tab to the field containing "Ishmael" to rename the main character.