They weren't "hidden" in the menus. It's always been very clear that commands live in the menus. They weren't up front and center, but you knew where they were if you wanted them. The fact that there is a menu bar makes it very clear that there's more you can do.
The ribbon design is in your face, it takes up valuable real estate, and (to this day) I still find it hard to locate the options I'm looking for. I find it to be a HUGE step down from the functionality of menus.
I love the Office 'ribbon' because it has icons whereas the menus don't. It makes it very easy to quickly pick the tool I need by muscle and visual memory. Also, MS does icons and design well, IMO, because they don't make everything too flat or hidden, they give very intuitive indications of mouse position and such, like with a slight popping-up of the button or whatever. With the menus, I have to engage my language part of my brain rather than just looking for an icon and clicking it.
> It makes it very easy to quickly pick the tool I need by muscle and visual memory
When you are at the point of muscle memory, menu shortcuts are far better -- because they have keyboard shortcuts associated with them that for power users with muscle memory are 5x faster than mousing around.
It is not by accident that MS has kept those menu keyboard shortcuts even when killing their discoverability by killing the menu bar -- because their most valuable power users still press ALT-D-F-F first when encountering a new table rather than hunting around the ribbon bar.
I'm one of those people who use keyboard shortcuts sparingly. I actually prefer the mouse, even for things I do over and over everyday. Why? I'm not quite sure, but I've tried using the keyboard in the past with vim or whatever, and I just prefer to use my mouse for most things. It was hard to remember the combos, even after a few weeks. I do use cli quite a bit, but that's slightly different. If I used office more, maybe that'd be the application which converted me to more keyboard use. I basically only use vscode, slack, and Firefox/Chrome everyday.
The ribbon gets a lot of grief, but I think it is a step forward from conventional menus in discoverability. The secret is having multiple types and sizes of controls. If you have 3 top level menu items with 4 option each, a user can very quickly scan for what they're trying to do. If you have 6 or 8 top level categories and 10-30 items under each, it's a totally different story.
With menus, you have to use sub and even sub-sub menus for organization, and the user has to mouse over or use the keyboard to see the sub-options. Every sub(-sub) menu looks the same, maybe with a tiny icon to help find it. With the ribbon, every top level category naturally has major sub-groupings (horizontally), within which more important / commonly-used items can use larger icons, split buttons can be used to show a default action with related actions in a drop-down, and option-groups can be presented as a dropdown or expanded to show them all at once (think "view layout" in a file explorer).
I have to admit I had a negative reaction to the ribbon initially, but especially with the thoughtful integration into Windows Explorer it's really grown on me since. I'm not sure it's appropriate to replace every use of a conventional menu bar but I think it's the best fit in a lot of places.
The great thing about Google Docs is that it just doesn't have 99% of the features for which Ribbons were invented.
MS Office had accumulated thousands of features, most of which were beloved by a tiny fraction of users, and completely useless to the rest. That tiny fraction wanted instant access without having to memorize keyboard shortcuts, but no two wanted the same one.
Ribbons are about the best way I can think of to accept that premise. Aggravating at first, but you and it gradually learn what you do most often, and reach a steady state.
But better is to reject those features, put up a simple interface that captures the things you do 99% of the time, eliminates the .9% of fancy flashy stuff that some people use occasionally but everybody else is grateful to have gone, and just tells you to suck up the remaining .1% of stuff that you might actually use sometimes but can't have.
There are still days when I have to boot up LibreOffice or MS Office for some document that just absolutely positively needs something extra. Today, it's edit marks on a document, and being able to switch back and forth between the original and edited form, restoring old edits. But that's a special use case and I'm just as glad to not have to be ignoring that feature most days.
Wait till they desaturate the icons like they did in Visual Studio recently or make them all look the same splash of colors like google did with their product icons.
A big beef a lot of users had (myself included) was that those menus were so convoluted it was difficult to find the appropriate option for a given scenario. Made worse by the modal nature of the UX: upon clicking an option which was deeply hidden, the menu 'breadbrumbs' would immediately disappear.
I think it was a good change. Anecdotally, I noticed a big drop in people not being able to find particular functions since it's introduction (if you exclude the spate of complaints about the shift to the ribbon itself, which fizzled out over time as people got used to it).
The ribbon changes where things are depending on how big it is! Even reading the instructions online is embarrassing; I do love the fact that Office for Mac still has a working normal menu bar in addition to the ribbon.
The ribbon design is in your face, it takes up valuable real estate, and (to this day) I still find it hard to locate the options I'm looking for. I find it to be a HUGE step down from the functionality of menus.