>Absolutely disagree: "much easier and faster" is in the eye of the user.
>
>There's simply no way that any single design will be perceived as "best" by all users.

The menu was bad in several ways - the worst of it being the behavior whereby it vanishes as soon as you made a choice. You went somewhere (and don't tell me it's bad design, I'm talking about Word), clicked a wrong one, and can't find it again, and you only wanted to click the next one. The other bad thing is that it's organized by manufacturer - whose names I don't really memorize, nor feel obliged to. At some point I've really reorganized my start menu into categories, but then gave up when I installed Launchy.

But then there are people out there, millions of them, who were taught for the last 20+ years, that the hierarchy is the only worthwhile system of organization, and that it works on menus as well. And they learned how to use it, how to best memorize the locations of the stuff they need, they even learned to cope with ever-changing names (and therefore ordering) of items, and became proficient with them. Why take that away?