I’m at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference today and watched Bill Gates unveil various products including recent builds of Windows Vista. But the big surprise (other than the great video featuring Bill Gates and Napolean Dynamite as roommates) was the new UI in Office 12.

Read my lips: no new menus.

Actually, there were no menus at all. I haven’t had the chance to play with the new suite myself but the demos this morning showed a surprising new UI for Office that had replaced all application menus with graphical palettes.
I had expected to yawn through the presentation of Office 12. Instead, I was struck by a burning desire to play with it immediately. I have a healthy fear of pre-beta software though (learned the hard way) so I’ll settle for being one of the first in line for the beta.
In the meantime, I’m pondering the ramifications to users and wondering whether this will become a trend or not. These apps are some of the most widely used apps in the world and their last significant UI innovation (toolbars) was eight years ago—practically a lifetime in this industry. It’ll be interesting to see what comes of this but either way, it’s exciting to see what might be a widespread step forward in desktop software user experience.
You can read more about the rationale and research behind it here and, even better, check out hi-res images of each of the Office products.
Stay tuned tomorrow and Wednesday for more surprises.