O’Reilly Network: Top Ten FAQs for Web Services
By standardizing on XML, different applications can more easily talk to one another, and this makes software a whole lot more interesting.
Reading this, I feel optimistic that one day we’ll interact with information instead of licenseware.
This was the promise of the Internet, circa 1995 before Bill Gates’ “Internet Tidal Wave” swamped the smaller boats. It remains to be seen how platform-agnostic one can really be and thrive, but perhaps it’s finally too big for any one entity — save the marketplace — to control.