Office 15: The Mile-High View (Windows IT Pro)

Excerpt from an extensive Paul Thurrott overview

"From an applications perspective, Office 15 isn’t blazing the way with new applications, but then the suite is so full-featured it doesn’t really have any obvious functional holes at this point. Instead, we see an evolution of existing capabilities from application to application and the formalization of a new design language, if you will, that’s equally at home on both traditional PCs and the touch-based Windows devices that are expected to become increasingly popular.
Key to this dual-use nature is a new, washed-out user experience that pervades across the app with just color-coded accents to break the monotony. According to Microsoft, this is an attempt to highlight the content you’re working on and deemphasize the surrounding UI “chrome.” It’s a Metro-based design principle, similar to the work Microsoft has previously done with Internet Explorer 9 and 10, Windows Phone, and, of course, Windows 8."

Office 15: The Mile-High View