> They never considered making the underlying products more simple.
I mean, how could they, really? Their primary-revenue-source customers are enterprises with established workflows, that want those established workflows to continue to work. These enterprises would be very unhappy if Microsoft changed the "architecture" of how any of their products do anything, or even how automation products (e.g. VBA macros) would have to interact with their products to accomplish things. The only reason these companies stick with Microsoft, rather than switching to a competitor like Google, is that Microsoft ensures their 20-year-old VBA-laden Excel workbooks continue to work on new versions of Excel.
Any change Microsoft makes to their UI, has to require at-most-trivial changes to these enterprise workflows. And so Microsoft can only really make at-most-trivial changes. They can't cut any Gordian knots by e.g. merging two features into one that solves both problems, because then the workflows couldn't work in terms of the original two features any more.
I feel like the only way Microsoft could really get out of this hole, is by just creating an entirely-new suite of products, that "replace" their existing products for new users, but aren't meant to replace their existing products for existing users, and so where the existing products wouldn't get deprecated/put on life support, until they're something only stodgy old dinosaur companies are using any more.
If they're willing to do it (a dozen times so far) for their collaboration/groupware suite; then why not do it for Office?