Olivetti's real achievement may be to open up a sheltered part of the European telecoms business.
Tronchetti even has his eye on reviving Olivetti, now a division of Tel Italia.
What happens next will depend partly on the reception that the regulator gives to Olivetti's proposals.
In order to win control of Telecom Italia, however, Olivetti saddled itself with enormous amounts of debt.
ECONOMIST: A risky move into telecoms has upset a lot of shareholders
At Olivetti he sold the personal-computer division and other money-losing businesses, to concentrate on telephones, especially mobiles.
Others think that Telecom Italia's industrial and financial plans to fend off Olivetti are not good enough.
It was not he who set up Olivetti's vastly successful mobile-telephone business, Omnitel Pronto Italia, but his predecessor.
Given all that, Telecom Italia may end up looking more modern than Olivetti as a result of the bid.
Telecom Italia's new bosses have inherited the huge debts that Olivetti took on.
ECONOMIST: A risky move into telecoms has upset a lot of shareholders
Olivetti's bid, in effect, proposes its managers as the best for the job.
Last year, it made an abortive attempt to rescue Telecom Italia, Italy's former monopolist, from the clutches of Olivetti.
Some are waiting for the publication of Olivetti's prospectus, which was filed for the regulator's approval on April 9th.
Olivetti offers none of these, says a businessman once close to the firm.
He could put together a counter-bid along the lines of the Olivetti-Tecnost scheme.
True, the bid from Olivetti was so outrageous as to seem unbelievable, but Telecom Italia's defence has been slow and complacent.
Another is how Olivetti would treat Telecom Italia's minority shareholders, who would sit at the end of a stack of holding companies.
His ardour may have been dampened by Telecom Italia's newish chairman, Franco Bernabe, who insisted that the Olivetti bid was too low to succeed.
Rather than face a shareholder revolt, Olivetti abandoned a restructuring of Telecom Italia last year that would have cost minority shareholders a small fortune.
It is reported that the Soviet Union has, among other things, utilized Olivetti-supplied machine tools to fabricate its new YAK-41 supersonic, short-take-off-and-landing naval fighter aircraft.
The machine tools allegedly sold by the Italian firm, Olivetti, to a Soviet aeronautics factory where they were used to build the YAK 41 fighter-bomber.
In February 1999, a group of businessmen from Brescia, a city east of Milan, launched a successful hostile bid using Olivetti as the takeover vehicle.
ECONOMIST: A risky move into telecoms has upset a lot of shareholders
One is the heavy debt with which Olivetti would saddle Telecom Italia, and on which it would have to pay a high rate of interest.
Olivetti's brightest telecoms managers will move to Mannesmann with its subsidiaries.
Olivetti's boss, Roberto Colaninno, became Telecom Italia's chairman and chief executive.
ECONOMIST: A risky move into telecoms has upset a lot of shareholders
Scaglia in five years transformed the Olivetti subsidiary, Omnitel Pronto Italia, into Europe's second-largest national wireless operator, stepping down when Olivetti bought Telecom Italia in 1999.
Unfortunately, there is considerable evidence that Olivetti is not the only Western manufacturer of machine tools to have transferred strategically significant equipment to the Soviet bloc.
For one thing, Mr Colaninno exerts his control over Olivetti through a teetering stack of nested stakes in firms that give him just 0.9% of the firm's equity.
Former insiders say Olivetti's survival strategy of abandoning information systems was in place when Mr Colaninno arrived from the car components industry, where he had worked since 1969.
The deals with Olivetti mean it now controls two of the three largest mobile networks in Europe (see chart) as well as promising ventures in France and Austria.
Moreover, shareholders of Bell, the vehicle through which Olivetti was controlled, saw the transaction as an opportunity to make a profit quickly, rather than as a long-term industrial investment.
ECONOMIST: A risky move into telecoms has upset a lot of shareholders
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