I’ve seen many comments on the Microsoft-Novell affair, like Tony’s very good one. Some more will appear in the next few days, I suppose. I’ll take a little space to say a few words about it.

I’ve read about an alliance in the interest of customers… wow! THAT would be a scoop by itself, and a completely new thing for Microsoft. Or can you think of something they did that wasn’t in only their interest? It’s business? Ok, but let’s play it fair then: I know that marketing rules don’t allow anyone to say straight “I am just trying to get more money, you know?”, but you are not compelled to tell lies; if you can’t tell the truth just shut your mouth and don’t try to make fun of us.

But another thing caught my attention (or should I say worries me?): they announced a commitment to improving the interaction between Microsoft’s top-selling suite of Office software and a free alternative known as OpenOffice.

“Improve interaction”… uh! Ok, let’s talk about what Microsoft means with words like interaction, interoperable, standard, or cross-platform. And since I don’t want to talk in abstract, let’s talk about real things: RTF.

What is RTF? According to Wikipedia, The Rich Text Format (often abbreviated to RTF) is a proprietary document file format developed and owned by Microsoft since 1987 for cross-platform document interchange. Oh, boy. Who out there has written a lot of documents in RTF format with Microsoft Word and can say they have had no problems in reading them with other applications, please raise your hand.

Oh, but wait, it’s not their fault, is it? there are many different specifications of RTF, aren’t they? That’s why the format evolved over time, didn’t it?

Well, I don’t know what kind of improvements the latest specification of RTF brought, but strangely enough it is no more interoperable with OpenOffice.

How I discovered it? Well, I wrote an article for an Italian magazine called Login, whose technical editor was a well known person to us; let’s call him Tony. So I diligently followed the guidelines, copied the RTF template and wrote my article on it using OpenOffice Writer and handed it to Tony; Tony sent it back to me with some little revisions, I worked on it and sent it back to him. Luckily Tony didn’t send it to his staff directly; he opened it with a well known Redmond text editor and found it nearly empty. What the heck?

Marco… it could be a disaster because of your attachment :-D. * articolo-rev seems to have just a program listing inside. * riquadro 2 seems to be empty. * tabella 1 appears empty. …!.

I reopened the attachment: everything was there as it should. I said to Tony… surprise! Once OpenOffice has put its hands on a Word-made RTF file, Word can’t read it correctly anymore. So is the new RTF specification an improvement or a move to cut OpenOffice userbase?

I should draw the conclusions at this point, but I am running out space. You’ll have to draw them yourself this time. Feel free to drop your comments below.

—bronto