I don’t know what to think about Microsoft. The Europeans believe that Microsoft is a bad actor that cannot be trusted. When a third-party application encounters compatibility problems with Microsoft software, the Europeans automatically attribute some nefarious monopolist motive to the Redmond behemoth.

But, what if Microsoft was just incompetent and not ill-mannered? How else can one explain the compatibility problems between the two latest versions of Microsoft Office? I downloaded a Microsoft Word file that was encoded in the new .docx format. I opened the Word document using Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac Home & Student Edition and I didn’t see any formatting issues. However, when I viewed the same document using Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007 (Windows), the document was formatted differently. Specifically, spaces that appeared in the Mac version of Office did not appear in the Windows version of Office. How can this be?

After some testing, this is what I discovered. When I saved an Office 2008 document in the .docx format, Office 2007 stripped out some of the spaces. By some, I mean a lot of spaces, including spaces between words as well as a series of leading spaces used to align text. If I saved the same document using Office 2008 in the .doc format (i.e., Word 97), I had no portability problems between the Mac/Windows versions of Office.

So, you tell me. Are incompatibility between Office 2008 and Office 2007 due to evilness or incompetence?

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Microsoft made a bid for Yahoo last Friday. This move should prove beneficial for Yahoo if it can escape from the clutches of the Redmond behemoth. Yahoo has been wandering for a few years now, and it really needs to focus and execute again. Hopefully, this will accelerate their turn-around plans.

Yahoo used to be my #1 destination for news, e-mail and maps. Now, Google and Yahoo divide my attention equally for news and e-mail, and Google has completely taken over for maps. For me, the turning point for maps was Google’s introduction of draggable maps. That was when I switched over to using Google exclusively, even though Yahoo now offers something similar.

I still prefer My Yahoo over iGoogle, though it took me forever to switch over to the My Yahoo beta. I kept switching back-and-forth between the classic My Yahoo and the My Yahoo beta for the longest time. I simply didn’t feel that the beta was an improvement, hence the back-and-forth.

As bad as Yahoo is struggling right now, I think Microsoft is faring even worse. I still keep a hotmail account, but I really don’t check it all that often. I don’t visit any of Microsoft’s online properties, and I don’t know anyone else that does. If Microsoft took over Yahoo and imposed their kludginess on Yahoo, I might have to switch to Google exclusively.

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