http://www.infoworld.com/articles/pl/xml/02/11/18/021118plmsxml.xml

What do you think?

A few things I ponder:

You could use the infrastructure of Office to build business
applications and avoid custom UIs, reinventing the wheel and reduce coding.

Database access could become batch in nature, while work can be
done against xml documents closer to the user.
Performance and accessibility gains could abound.

Xsl and Schema could reduce the amount of Object/Procedural code
which could be a good thing.
Application bugs could diminish some and workflow becomes
inherent.

Upgrades to platforms and products may enhance the application
rather than break backward compatibility.

This could accelerate the pace of applications moving towards a
more distributive, networked, message based interaction.

Business applications could actually be delivered better,
cheaper and faster since you just have xml and office.

Business customers become more satisfied since they don't need
an IT permission slip to their data.

Data (xml) becomes more of the application rather than the
application being code.
The same application (xml) could be more cross platform and 99%
non proprietary.

Xml programming (programming in the xml itself) may become more
likely.
This has the benefit of programming in a way that you follow the
data more intuitively during implementation.

All of this was possible before Office 11, but Office 11 could
open such a floodgate, that . . . .