$30 billion in damages caused by Microsoft bug

A few weeks ago I suddenly noticed that using Microsoft Office 2010 didn't bother me anymore. It was no longer stressful and I knew how to locate most functions. From time to time I still need to check Help or use Google to locate functions I have not yet memorized, but I am now reasonably fast and efficient (almost as efficient as with the “pre-ribbon” version).

Microsoft introduced the so called ribbon interface in MS Office 2007 and moved almost all features to new GUI locations. I still remember my frustration when in November 2010 I was forced to migrate from Office 2003 to Office 2007. After 15 years of experience with Microsoft Office I suddenly became a novice with only minimal knowledge of where to find typical features. Creation and modification of MS Word documents suddenly slowed down to a crawl. I was almost constantly looking into Help or Googling to find new locations of familiar features. I was not spending this time learning new features – I was spending this time on finding new locations of features I have already mastered during 15 years of use.

Two and a half years after transitioning to the “ribbon based” version of MS Office, I am finally content with this product. I am not yet as productive as before, but the productivity gap has become negligible.

My estimate is that I lost about 100 hours in two and a half years due to diminished productivity caused by transitioning from MS Office 2003 to MS Office 2007.

And what about other people? Let’s estimate their losses caused by the ribbon interface.

Right now MS Office is purportedly “used by over a billion people worldwide”, according to Wikipedia.

I believe that most of them are novice users who started on MS office with the ribbon interface and were not affected by the transition.

I assume that only 3 million people in western countries were power users of MS Office and experienced about the same challenges as me.

Assuming a $100 per hour loaded cost of their time we can estimate total business losses as:

3,000,000 people x 100 hours x $100 per hr = $30,000,000,000.

According to my calculations businesses lost 30 billion dollars due to introduction of the ribbon interface by Microsoft.

Was it worth it? I am not sure.

I do not recall seeing a comparison of economic benefits and losses due to the introduction of the ribbon interface.

$30 billion in losses may be OK if benefits exceeded this amount.

Have they?