The simplest answer is that Microsoft's software mimics the design of the organization with multiple fifedoms building their own toolkit, causing fragmentation.
We already know that the Office and Windows teams have different GUI toolkits from reports from inside the company. But there is evidently a lot more fragmentation than just those 2 groups.
What I find more interesting is that Google products are starting to feel similarly fragmented. Project fi, Android, Plus, and Search all look and behave differently. My damn phone gets SMS on Hangouts and the Messenger app, my voicemails come on the phone and hangouts. None of it makes sense.
We can all agree that inconsistent GUIs are bad, but it seems like a problem you have to solve from a top down organizational perspective, which might not obviously align with the business.
Word, Excel, PowerPoint were all coded between 1989 and 1993. And received major update with Word 6 and Office 95 and 97. Basically Office 97 was feature complete. Very little has changed since then. The ribbon bar and all the other minor increment improvements are really minor compared to the changes up to Office 97. Office uses it's own UI library. Using Word 6 in Win95 shows floating toolbars in Win3.1 UI theme. Office 95 had an italic title bar. Using Office 97 in WinXP or Win7 shows and Win95 UI theme.
We already know that the Office and Windows teams have different GUI toolkits from reports from inside the company. But there is evidently a lot more fragmentation than just those 2 groups.
What I find more interesting is that Google products are starting to feel similarly fragmented. Project fi, Android, Plus, and Search all look and behave differently. My damn phone gets SMS on Hangouts and the Messenger app, my voicemails come on the phone and hangouts. None of it makes sense.
We can all agree that inconsistent GUIs are bad, but it seems like a problem you have to solve from a top down organizational perspective, which might not obviously align with the business.