Rick Schaut rises to answer him. Now Rick’s a good guy, and sincere, but I suspect he knows in his heart of hearts just how right John Welch is. Still, Word is his project, and I’m sure he loves it, and we all want to defend our babies. (My apologies to Rick for misspelling his name in the first iteration of this article.)

I certainly think no less of him for his attempt, but he glosses over most of the points Welch makes, and limits himself to defending against the easier ones. I remember well the pain engendered by moving a reasonably complex document from MacWord to WinWord and back, from Welch’s post it’s apparent this hasn’t changed much, and from Shaut’s silence on those issues, I suspect it never will.

Welch’s list of problems includes incompatibility with a laundry list of Microsoft technologies, Shaut focuses on IRM, and blames the problem on Apple for not having such a system built into the OS. It’s a valid point, though still arguable, as Welch’s comment was about Word’s interaction with IRM on a MS server and it’s a fair question to ask why Apple should concern itself with facilitating MS software to talk to MS servers.

But I can be gracious and yield the point to Shaut entirely, and still Welch’s complaint will stand. I’d even add something obvious. I can’t believe MS is committed to MacOffice until I see similar capabilities shipping in both versions of Office Professional. Windows version ships a page layout app; Mac version, well, sorry about that. LiveMeeting, Sharepoint, Content Management, all those are pure MS plays that MacOffice can’t use.

As an outsider, the only conclusion I can draw is the one I drew all those years ago. MS doesn’t want me to use its software in a diverse environment. It wants me to be either all Mac or all Windows, and doesn’t want me to mix platforms. Since I’ve always been a firm believer that people should use the tool that best fits their hand, that point of view doesn’t cut it with me.

I’m open to evidence on this point, though. Show me any meaningful effort MS has made to create diversity and I’ll listen. Publishing APIs doesn’t count, though. I want to see actual effort expended; Welch mentioned Services for Macintosh, which is so badly decayed you can smell it even outside of the server room; if you want to connect Macs and PCs, you certainly can’t use anything from MS to do it. You have to use products from Apple or Thursby. The MS attitude seems to be, “You have to spend time, money and effort to talk to us; we won’t spend anything to talk to you.”

And as along as that attitude prevails, I can’t be a MS customer.