David Pogue on Office 2011 for the Mac:
The Mac suite now includes the Ribbon, a horizontal toolbar that’s built into Office for Windows. What I don’t get is this: Last time I checked, computer screens were all wider than they are tall. The last thing you’d want to do is to eat up that limited vertical screen space with interface clutter like the Ribbon. Don’t we really want those controls off to the side, as with the Formatting Palette in the previous Mac Office?
Overall he doesn’t like it, and you know why? Pogue said it at the beginning of the review:
Much of the work Microsoft has done is to make the Mac version of Office look and work more like the Windows versions.
That is always a recipe for disaster because it never feels like a ‘real’ Mac application when companies try to do that.