C. Moya wrote...

...

Responding from the Excel newsgroup.

It all depends on whether corporate buyers will act like critical
thinkers or lemmings. If like the latter, they'll probably adopt Office
2007 at a slightly slower rate than they adopted Office 2003 (slow
lemmings getting slower). If they think about the upgrade, then some
will adopt quickly for the new features, and some will decide not to
update any time soon. The not-any-time-soon group will include
companies that have heavy investments in Excel and/or Access
applications that had made heavy use of modifying the default menus
and/or created several special purpose toolbars. That is, if the
reprogramming cost of converting toolbars to either the ribbon or task
panes is perceived as too great, then a fair number of companies will
likely wait for the next version after Office 2007.

As for the wonderful new themes and the inconsistencies between
applications, Microsoft was faced with a choice: be embarrassed by
these inconsistencies or be embarrassed by not shipping a new Office
version until mid-2007 at the earliest. They chose the option that
would bring in more revenue (what a shock!).

As someone whose Office usage is roughly 70% Excel, 25% Access, 5% Word
and have changed the default operation for .PPT files from Open to Show
(since I only view the @#$% things and never create 'em) and don't use
Outlook for e-mail, my UI preferences are probably skewed compared the
the 'average' Office user. Still, it was VERY USEFUL to be able to dock
some toolbars on the right or on the bottom of Excel and Access
application windows. The new Office 2007 UI eliminates that
functionality. And unless the feature some poor, dumb user wants is on
the current ribbon tab, claims that it'd be easier to find in the
ribbon seem specious to me. In case it isn't clear yet, I do just kinda
sorta hope that Office 2007 is a disaster sales-wise. But there's a lot
of lemmings out there.