I searched the DS corpus for meaningful articles related to the XML technology and what Microsoft plans to do with this technology in future releases of its software products. XML itself is being viewed as an entension to HTML. XML's flexibility comes from its ability to enable you to make up your own XML elements. It also promises portability, structure and can be very descriptive by nature. I will explore below uses of XML proposed by Microsoft in their products. Below you will find excerpts of the articles I reviewed. 

Another change in Commerce Enterprise Server will be that a staple of the
current Site Server Commerce Edition, the Commerce Interchange Pipeline
(CIP), will be removed and offered as a separate product, referred to as
Commerce Interchange Server. Although CIP previously provided its own way
of conveying transmissions between commerce applications, Commerce
Interchange Server will now include Extensible Markup Language (XML)
technology to facilitate interoperability, sources close to Microsoft said.

MSN Marketplace will be similar to Yahoo Store and Lycos Shop. It will be
based on the Microsoft New Interactive Technology for Resellers Online, or
Nitro technology and will also utilize XML. MSN Marketplace is intended to
attract consumers to use the portal for the selling of wares in a type of
"federation" of merchants.

MSN Marketplace is the most technically advanced vision of using XML to
create a trading community [to date]," said Vernon Keenan, an Internet
analyst at Keenan Vision, in San Francisco, which next week will release
The Keenan Report: The E-Merchant Opportunity. "But they lack a complete
solution that includes banking and other financial services. They still
require you to get your own merchant account."

When the Extensible Markup Language (XML) enabled people to create their
own unique data-markup tags, many industry observers feared that chaos
would ensue.

XML Namespaces enable developers to define a tag that uniquely identifies
their data source at the top of an XML document. This feature will become
especially important when third parties begin to aggregate content from
other sources

Microsoft provides XML Namespaces support in the beta version of Internet
Explorer 5.0.

To achieve that level of communication, Microsoft -- along with industry
partners including Intel and Hewlett-Packard -- is developing a common set
of interfaces that manufacturers will be able to use to build products that
will be Universal-Plug-and-Play-compatible. The technology will be based on
open standards, primarily TCP/IP and XML, Mundie said.

The SQL Server upgrade, based on Windows 2000, will support advanced
parallelism, fail-over clusters and log shipping, English queries, data
mining and materialized views, according to the documents provided at the
Seattle resellersummit. The server will also be XML-enabled. Microsoft has talked sporadically of Shiloh, mostly when addressing integrators and VARs concerned that SQL Server was not scalable enough for large enterprises. CRN first reported on Shiloh in November 1997.

Several XML proponents, including Sun, IBM, and Microsoft have already
developed programs that allow applications written in Java to read XML.
Sun's goal is to define a standard that will ensure that those programs,
known as "parsers," will all work together, said Nancy Lee, Sun's senior
product manager for XML.

XML also offers a standard format for exchanging data between businesses
and could help lower the cost of developing applications for electronic
commerce, supply-chain management, and other programs that rely on
business-to-business communications, Lee said.

In conclusion it would appear that not only Microsoft but Sun, IBM etc. are poised to make a standard on XML. These articles point out that XML has a very significant future in the Distributed Systems arena.

Summary based on articles 137.htm, 21.htm, 58.htm, 189.htm, 169.htm, 159.htm or a subset of the xml AND microsoft search over the DS articles corpus.