Here’s to compatibility

Welcome to this week’s Reno News & Review.

“So,” you ask, “what’s special about this editor’s note?”

Well, it was composed entirely in OpenOffice. I used my Microsoft Word Editor’s Note template, which I imported into OpenOffice Writer. That means the fonts, styles, and words that I use every week (like “Welcome to the week’s Reno News & Review”) were instantly available at the moment I needed them—exactly as they were last week in Microsoft Word.

Everything looks exactly the same. OK, I haven’t yet figured out how to turn off word completion or add a word-count button to the toolbar. But give me a week or two, and everything will work exactly like Word.

I guess the big difference is a year or two ago I bought Microsoft Office Professional for about $400. I downloaded OpenOffice from openoffice.org for free.

Now, since Microsoft owns 90 percent of the computer software world, I set up my OpenOffice to automatically save my documents as .doc documents, in order to work with QuarkXPress, our page layout and design application. Seamless.

I have exactly nothing against Bill Gates. He does a lot of good with some of that money he makes. There are a lot of companies that, because of their anti-competitive actions, became dominant in their fields. But I know big isn’t as nimble as small.

I heard investors might want to take a look at Microsoft stock after this Xbox 360 blip, when the company is once again suffering from lawsuits in the European Union, open-source problems and malefic virus writers. Next year, Microsoft will launch the Vista Operating System, and it will be the most extensive, expensive computer upgrade in history. For the first few months after its release, viruses, spyware and malware will only be able to attack XP and earlier. Get it? Only people who don’t upgrade will be vulnerable.

And did you see Sun is giving away Solaris 10, and Novell is giving away SUSE 10?