Jensen Harris says personalized menus are going away.
You might know what these are but not what they are called. They are the menus which show "recently used commands" first and hide the entire rest of the menu. To me this was about as stupid as a real menu (one from which you pick food to eat) which only showed you what you had the last time you were there.
Microsoft put them into Office (including Project) as an attempt to hide the clutter that feature bloat had caused. Unfortunately beyond limiting your perspective to things you already knew - thereby limiting your growth and understanding of the application, they had the unfortunate property of changing occasionally so you could not rely on a consistant physical location for the menu item. Jensen wrote a bit about this before stating:
"Auto-customization, unless it does a perfect job, is usually worse than no customization at all. Although the algorithm used to promote and demote menu items is rather complex and well thought-out, it's not perfect. Because it's not perfect, it does the wrong thing a lot of the time. (If it's even clear what a "right thing" is for a feature like this.) What people experienced is a sense randomness and unpredictability: one time, a menu item would be in a certain place, and then two days later it wasn't there anymore."
Well, he definitely got that part right. And it is good news that even though MS Project 2006 is not getting the same sort of interface makeover that the core office apps (Word, Excel, Powerpoint) at least this feature will be off by default.
