Napoleon Bonaparte is reputed to have said, “A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon.” Judging from scuttlebutt on the web, Office users have been struggling long and hard to cope with a new colored ribbon.
Author Robert Benchley once said, “The biggest obstacle to professional writing is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon.” The modern equivalent may be that the biggest obstacle to professional work in Office 2007 is an arbitrarily changing ribbon.
Simon Murphy has hosted a week’s worth of commentary about the Office UI Ribbon, aka the Office Fluent Interface. This last has been modified to Effluent Interface by its biggest “fans”. Simon uses the phrase frequently, and so do several of his readers, but I think I may have actually coined the term in a comment on Simon’s blog.
