Elliotte Rusty Harold at IBM developerWorks - The future of XML:

"Of course, the most important conversion isn't from OpenDoc to OOXML or vice versa: it's a down conversion from either OpenDoc or OOXML to XHTML. The HTML exporters in OpenOffice and Microsoft Office are uniformly atrocious. Look for third-party developers to pick up the slack. Most important, look for individual corporate developers and webmasters to begin publishing custom templates for their sites. This will enable regular folks to write in Microsoft Word as they're accustomed to doing and then upload their musings straight into the local content-management system. Editing and reviewing tools can be built right in.

[...] Traditionally, you see two hard problems in training non-techies to write for the Web: teaching them semantic markup and showing them how to use FTP. (Remember, many nontechnical users can't even use the standard File Open dialog box. They store everything in the My Documents folder or on the desktop. They're lost if they accidentally put a file somewhere else. Programmers understand hierarchies, but many users don't think that abstractly.)

XML-enabled word processors like OpenOffice and Microsoft Word solve the first problem. The Atom Publishing Protocol solves the second. APP will do to do for Web authoring what HTTP did for Web browsing: provide a standard protocol that a variety of independent clients and servers can use to communicate without prior agreement or a shared conceptual model.

[...] Query is finally ready for production, and APP is ready to break out. If I was looking to invest money or time in XML, these are the technologies I'd focus on. The world might not need yet another content-management system, blog engine, or bulletin board; but it absolutely could use each of these if they stored and searched their content with a native XML database and published to it with APP."