I can perfectly see why a web browser would carry a ‘Home’ button, after wandering about for a while one sometimes desire to ‘get back Home’. I don’t use it all too often but it doesn’t bother me much. Folks at Camino and Safari understood this, the ‘Home’ button is not that prominent and can easily be removed from these products’ toolbar.
However, a ‘home’ menu option on an office productivity suite is baffling to me. What’s that suppose to mean? Sure, clutter-free context-sensitive tasks and menu options are nice improvements. But who’s idea was it to replace ‘File’ with ‘Home’? This is not only counter-intuitive, it smacks of well…fear.
Microsoft’s focus on improving user interface is encouraging, the new Office suite and Windows Vista experience have seen notable improvements. But a ‘Home’ menu is out of place on the Office toolbar (or whatever they now call it). Giants like them could stay level headed and introduce the right innovations, not confuse their users with such cheap tricks. An office suite is conceptually closer to a toolkit than a city map, there simply can’t be any notion of ‘Home’ in the former.