Why did UI's turn from practical to form over function?
E.g. Office 2003 vs Microsoft 365
It's easy to remember where everything is with a toolbar and menu bar, which allows access to any option in one click and hold move.
Seriously? Big ribbon and massive padding wasting space, as well as the ribbon being clunky to use.
Why did this happen?
I was a moderator on the Paint.NET forums for a long while in the mid to late 00s. You would be surprised at how many questions we got about when Paint.NET would get "the new ribbon UI!"
The answer was never, incidentally.
I kinda remember those conversations, wasn't there an issue back then that Microsoft had a patent on the ribbon ?
I don't think so. He just said that he had evaluated it and it wasn't a good fit for the application. I remembered it was in our Popular Feature Requests thread, and I looked back and (crazy enough) it's still there.