You’ve come a long way baby!

Jensen Harris continues to inform and entertain me with information on the new Office 12 2007. In some of his latest entries he looks to the future by showing us where we’ve been with the previous Office UI’s.

In Part 1, Jensen provides a quick overview of the general interface conventions that were developed by PARC in the 1970’s, and how those changes found their way out of Xerox and into Apple and Microsoft applications. An interesting thing that he mentioned in Part 1 that I didn’t expect was that Microsoft is still the largest supplier of software for Apple. I expected this to be a company like Adobe or something with all their graphics, video, and audio applications.

In Part 2, Jensen provides some great chronological screen shots of how the Word interface has changed, yet remained the same from version 1.0 to 2003.

Word 97 was the first version in which we started to see signs that people were feeling less in control of the program. Office 97 was a huge hit with both individuals and companies, but It was also marked the beginning of a long series of press stories accusing Office of being “bloated.”

(How interesting that today some people hearken back to Office 97 as being some sort of ultra-simple software panacea and how different that is from how people viewed it at the time.)

Source: Ye Olde Museum Of Office Past (Why the UI, Part 2)

Source: The Why of the New UI (Part 1)