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?