When looking at their screenshots of their to-come office 12 user interface I found some things that are just dead wrong.

Basically they help users to choose a pure visual instead of information oriented approach to documents. The semantic formatting tools are discredited as "quick styles", totally ignoring their behaviour (for me this implies that this is just a set of formattings, not e.g. used for a table of contents, and also not that the formatting will change when I change the style definition) In the age of XML this is just plain wrong!

Look at one of the first two screenshots. The semantic formatting is moved to the right, becoming like a second-class formatting, with the first class being the font face, and even the underline formatting tool...

(Underline is considered to be an outdated formatting, back from when your typewriter didn't have any formatting options, and underline was the only thing you could easily add manually... it is bad, and you shouldn't use it except for hyperlinks!)

In a modern tool, the font box there should not exist. All formatting should be done by assigning semantic "tags" and defining how these are expected to render. (Just like you have been doing with LaTeX for ages, and many people are doing nowadays with CSS.)

And the "font" dropdown especially is really bad. Nothing is worse than letting people use different fonts within a document that easily. Hide all font choosing options except for letting them pick one font for headlines and one for the text body. The results will be way better.

Basically, Word is still not a "document processor", but a paint program. The tools are more suited for making a poster than for writing a document...

A good word processor would help people separate formatting from content, instead of doing the wrong thing easier.

Also, from a very different UI level: the "tabs" don't look like tabs. But I guess that will change with the final skin.

Still it looks to me very much like just a revamp of the UI, and maybe some nice gimmicks such as converting lists to diagrams, but it is lacking the real step from the visual "document painting" to a real next generation document processing.

Oh, and the Microsoft "XML format" will be pretty useless for exactly this reason: it doesn't help users to markup the semantic meaning, so the word XML files will be mostly "enable bold" "enable cursive" etc. - useless.