I'm all for a desktop paradigm shift, but I just don't see this as useful for people who actually USE their computers. It seems the more "power user" type people always get alienated with UI changes. Also, applications being fullscreen or crunched in to a sidebar seems like quite a step back in usefulness. Many floating windows you can arrange how you want are much more useful. Maybe if they expanded on the ability to create relationships between windows and the desktop so one could use these features for whatever programs they want, or organize tings in other ways.

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This doesn't look too bad, and you can also collapse the ribbon bar to use smal icons. They also said that it's going to have a lot of hotkeys, which is another plus, so one could just remove all the bars altogether. It seems like it's definitely an improvement and a good compromise for average users and people who actually want to get work done, and that a few adjustments (classic mode, disabling any unneeded toolbars) it could get pretty close. Not sure if it'll be possible to move the address bar on to the menubar, though, which seems silly and a bit lazy that the toolbars aren't just some container that can contain individual items. Hell, if they did it right, then users would be able to arrange their own ribbons and groups however they want, but I guess we won't have that. How dare the user want something different than their research has revealed about such a vague group of people. Either way, definitely a step in the right direction but could use work.

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Go further down, you can make the ribbon use small unlabeled icons.

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What do you mean? With a few clicks, it's narrower than the windows 98 explorer.

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It's a good compromise between keeping things accessible right away for new/average users, and still customizable to where someone who knows all the hotkeys can just disable it completely. Do you expect them to just have bare folder views and nothing else? How do you expect people to use that without knowing the hotkeys? Businesses would need to invest in training people a shitty interface because you wanted an extra couple rows of files. Does everyone use tiny netbooks anymore? This super minimal interface nonsense is ridiculous. Not everything just has to be completely devoid of visible controls. And I don't want to have to constantly open up menus to access functions. Now, I can certainly say tthat buttons and stuff are getting individually too large, which was silly for a while, but starts to make sense for touch screen crap. Not that I really agree with it, but people like finger-touchable interfaces I guess, and you can usually use smaller ones.

So, just consider it a definite improvement in usability for their target audience, while still not alienating people who are more experienced the way I've noticed 7's explorer to do, and when you get it just turn everything off so you just get a bare file view.

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