Today the world has changed. I really can not remember the last time that I have seen a blue screen of death on one of my Windows XP boxes. Microsoft started focusing on the Internet more heavily in 1999. That is when they started investing time in XML with several other industry leaders. Prior to that, most individuals used the internet for relatively simple tasks. (File Transfer�s, Web Page viewing, and E-Mail were the primary uses of the internet.) After evaluating the usefulness and speed of information transfer on the internet, these organizations saw a potential of developing applications that would build on the idea of information transfer from the internet and build a set of standards that would give programmers the ability to build their own applications, with their own predefined rules. This was the purpose of XML. Microsoft decided that it would be crucial to build bridges from all of their product offerings so that information could be more readily exchanged from different systems, as long as you understood the concepts of XML.