Fascinating post from Developer Express CTO Julian Bucknall about Microsoft’s new ribbon license scheme. Developer Express is a well-regarded vendor of components for .NET and Delphi developers. It’s an ambivalent post. Bucknall states that his company has signed the license, though he expresses some frustration at its restrictions:

Lurkers and active members of our newsgroups will have noticed that we’ve been downright evasive about our plans for enhancing our ribbon implementations. We’ve been asked for some very reasonable enhancements, such as docking the ribbon vertically or along the bottom edge of the application window. Well, now you understand our ambiguous replies: according to the license agreement we are prohibited from doing most of them.

He adds that:

…you, our customers, are not covered by our license agreement with Microsoft. The terms of the license are not transferable in that way: despite the fact that you are using our components, you will have to sign the Microsoft license yourselves for your own applications.

Should you sign? Although it is royalty-free, the agreement is not without obligations. As Bucknall notes, it includes “the Office UI Design Guidelines that describe, in almost excruciating detail, how the ribbon and its associated controls must work and must look in an application in order to satisfy the license.” Signing the document means agreeing that you are making use of Microsoft’s intellectual property, and also limits what you can do with the UI.

On the whole I’m in favour of UI standards, but this seems rather extreme.

I am not a lawyer but let’s recall that the matter of copyright in the look and feel of a user interface has been the subject of considerable debate and controversy. Some may dispute the necessity of signing an agreement with Microsoft in order to create a ribbon-like UI for your application.

This feels like part of a new and more aggressive IP strategy from Microsoft, tying in with other recent moves like the Novell agreement. It’s playing with fire.

Microsoft is generously allowing developers to use its ribbon UI, as seen in Office 2007, in their own software. But is this really so generous? Here’s the key proviso:

The license is available for applications on any platform, except for applications that compete directly with the five Office applications that currently have the new UI (Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Access).

It raises the interesting question: to what extent is the new UI in Office 2007 a ploy to counter Open Office? The truth is that many users cannot easily tell the difference between Microsoft Office and Open Office. They look similar. The new ribbon UI has two advantages for Microsoft:

• It looks distinctively different from other Office applications out there.
• Microsoft believes it has legally enforceable copyright in the new UI, extending to “both design and functionality.”

Why no menus in Word and Excel?

This may be the reason for another issue I’ve been puzzling over. Why is there no option to display a traditional menu in Office 2007? The reason is not technical. All the old keyboard shortcuts in Word and Excel still work, even the Alt combinations that access the menu. It is as if the menu is a ghostly presence.

I recall asking about this at the last PDC, when Office 2007 was unveiled. Microsoft said that providing a menu would stand in the way of users adopting the new UI. In other words, they would use the menu out of habit and never properly migrate to the new and presumed better way of doing things. But I wonder if this is also part of the legal strategy. With the menu in place, Word and Excel would look less distinctive; the ribbon would come over more like a fat toolbar, rather than a major new UI innovation.

Let me add that I would undoubtedly enable menus in Word and Excel, if they were available, as I have done in IE7. To me, toolbars are primarily shortcuts to commonly used features (I make an exception for the palettes in drawing and design applications). Menus on the other hand offer in-depth access to the full functionality of the product. Menus are efficient because they drop down when you need them, and collapse to a single line of screen space when not in use.

Would Microsoft have provided menus, at least as a compatibility option, if it were not so keen to look different from Open Office and enforce its IP?

A risky strategy

Removing the Office menus is a risky strategy. I’ve been using the new Office since the final code was made available, and it is disorientating. I’m intrigued and want to persevere to see if the ribbons really are more productive; but I’m not sure that the average Word or Excel user will take to it easily. Some at least will react against it and want their old Office back. If Microsoft is really unlucky, it could even serve to drive Open Office adoption, rather than preventing it.

On one level, I applaud Microsoft for taking some risks with Office 2007, after years of conservative upgrades. I’m keeping an open mind about the productivity benefits of the new UI. However, I doubt anyone would welcome the idea of the ribbon UI becoming an industry standard owned by Microsoft, and used specifically to prevent competition in office applications. It also strikes me that there are risks for developers who sign up for the “free” UI license. What if at some future point Microsoft said you are competing directly with Office?

Microsoft’s .NET Framework is now fully released. There is a handy page of links to the various downloads you might want. Of all Microsoft’s releases in this busy November, this is the most significant.

Why? Here’s what is in .NET Framework 3.0. There are four major pieces. Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is an alternative GUI API for Windows, based on a new XML language (XAML) and incorporating the code-behind concept first seen in ASP.NET. Although it is primarily for Windows, Microsoft is promising a cross-platform XAML runtime called Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere. On Windows, WPF apps are rendered using DirectX, giving it impressive multimedia capabilities. Summary: biggest change to the Windows API since its first release.

Windows Communication Foundation is a communication framework based on XML web services. If you are familiar with Windows development, the easiest way to define WCF is by what it replaces: ASP.NET web services, MSMQ (Microsoft Message Queue), COM+ (also known as Transaction Server) and Distributed COM, .NET Remoting.

I won’t say that WCF replaces all of COM, though perhaps it might do eventually. COM has many faces.

Windows Workflow Foundation is less important than WPF or WCF, but still interesting as a framework for workflow applications. It fits well with Sharepoint and Office 2007 as a way to program enterprise portals.

Windows CardSpace is an abstraction layer for identity management and authentication. Unlike Microsoft Passport, CardSpace is not itself an identity provider, but a rather a system that works with multiple identity providers. If widely adopted, it will help the Internet move on from the nightmare of usernames and passwords. IE7 is a CardSpace client.

When Microsoft first announted the above pieces, they were meant to be exclusive to “Longhorn”, now called Windows Vista. The company realised that this would stall adoption, possibly fatally, so it was decided to make it a free download for Windows XP as well as part of Vista. That makes .NET Framework 3.0 a viable development platform now, rather than in five year’s time (or never).

Like any new technology, this one could fall flat on its face. Time will tell whether it is really significant, or turns out to be a backwater in the latter days of Windows. Unlike Vista and Office, it is not an immediate profit centre for Microsoft, but in the longer term it is critically important to the company as an update to the Windows platform.