Windows 7: Microsoft’s assault on screen real estate

It’s official: Microsoft has declared war on the lowly PC display!

Their plan: Carpet-bomb the screen with Office Ribbon after Office Ribbon, until users finally shut the things off and throw up their hands in frustration!

Don’t believe me? Then consider the following screen shot. I took this on my 1600×1200 pixel screen running the Aero UI under Server 2008 (a.k.a. Windows “Workstation” 2008):

(Click the image for a larger view)

Note: The above shows a cascading arrangement of Office 2007 windows – replete with the infamous Ribbon tabbed interface – along with an image of a newly “Ribbonized” version of the Paint applet from Windows 7 superimposed for additional effect.

As you can see from the above screen shot, nearly the entire vertical resolution – 1050 pixels, or 87.5% – has been consumed by nothing but Ribbon bars (I highlighted the affected area with a red border).

Thanks to the Ribbon UI, my screen has now become a sea of UI junk – and I’ve only got a half-dozen windows open! What will happen when every window has a Ribbon?

The whole thing reminds me of a cartoon I once saw showing what happens when GUI designers are allowed to run free. The resulting “application” was basically one big collection of widgets and buttons, with only a tiny text-entry field for user input. And underneath this image, the developer is proudly quoted as saying something the the effect that  “and if you click here, you can replace that text box in the middle with widget xyz for a truly customized user experience!”

Note to Microsoft: I’m all for usability. However, before you foist such a controversial UI paradigm on us, please think the matter through. For example, find a way to make all this Ribbon business optional – or at least provide us with some way to minimize it so we can get our screen real-estate back!

I used to think that the reason Microsoft wasn’t promoting Vista, Office 2007, et al, for the OLPC space was the lack of adequate CPU performance/memory capacity. Now I know the real reason:

They couldn’t fit all those Ribbon bars on such a tiny LCD!