My friend Paul Baier was ranting about the new menus in Office 2007:  “they changed everything!”

It seems that widely used apps like Office have run into the QWERTY problem.   The QWERTY keyboard is not the best UI for touch typing — in fact, it was deliberately designed to minimize jamming problems on mechanical typewriters.  The Dvorak keyboard is generally acknowledged to be superior, BUT hasn’t been superior enough to displace QWERTY in the market.

There’s a lesson here for software designers:  if you have an app with a large installed base, consider that your current UI might be “good enough”.