So I’m writing this in Barcelona where Microsoft is holding its IT Forum event and I’m talking to a few people about an announcement that the software giant has made with a couple of dozen other IT suppliers about something called the Interop Vendor Alliance (IVA), the ‘interop’ being short for interoperability. And I’m feeling sceptical.

The IVA is a complement to Microsoft’s recent conversion to jaw-jaw rather than war-war. Financial settlements and pacts with Sun, Novell and others suggest Microsoft has taken a strategic decision to put old squabbles over intellectual property behind it in favour of cordial relations and promises to work together.

You can’t argue with the huge cash piles Microsoft has donated to prop up its former foes, and some useful minor improvements, for example in sign-on and authentication, will probably come out of these collaborations. But interoperability is all too often a weasel word and I’m not convinced that even a far longer list of suppliers than the IVA has summoned is capable of much more than cosmetic change.

Microsoft suggests the IVA will create a talking shop where development teams can discuss their work and hold events aimed at improving interoperability. Hmm. Hasn’t this always gone on?

The awful truth is that you’d have better luck trying to strain the Atlantic ocean with a tennis racket than clearing up the current mess. Despite decades of open systems, proprietary DNA runs through commercial software and probably always will. Vendors will always want to build a better mousetrap, find a way to do things that is better, faster and cheaper but tears the delicate fabric that lets software talk to software and computer to computer.

The complex supply chain from original notion to execution is tough enough within one organisation and a lot tougher once you try to persuade everybody outside your company to follow your lead. Ego, the Not Invented Here syndrome, the mandate to differentiate, and sometimes a desire to lock in customers – all of these mean that only basic interoperability emerges and mending the broken links is a Sisyphean task. Interestingly, the problem even occurs in the open-source community where allegations of forking code and multiple approaches to the same problem are common.

Of course, that’s why we have standards, committees of good people who sit through long meetings trying to discover a path between commercial, cultural, political and other interests. But even good standards are often observed in the breach, leading to the old joke that standards are so useful that you have several, conflicting ones for the same task.

So I’m here in Barcelona, trying to borrow a power charger for my phone because I forgot mine and the vendors get cash from maintaining different connectors. I’m using a laptop with a new charger because the last one broke, necessitating a long journey to get another because they’re all different. I’m connected to the mains with a Frankenstein power adaptor because every country has its own way of sucking electricity. And I’m feeling sceptical about interoperability.