ive been reading some analysis and disbelief as

I’ve been reading some analysis and disbelief as to how and why Microsoft would make a design like this for Explorer.

But I haven’t yet read what seems like the most obvious explanation: they felt they needed to do something; the Ribbon seems to have worked before, in Office 2007; so they repeated what they did before, with the Ribbon.

This is what business people do: they repeat what worked before, and expect it to work again. And again. Forever. When that stops working, they either retire on a big pile of money, or find someone else’s idea to leech off of and repeat.

It’s hard and risky to create something new. Who wants that?