Jon Udell has written a piece about WinFS. I don't really care that much about what kind of product Microsoft will ship in the year 2006, but one paragraph just hit right on the mark again:

Finally, I've drawn attention to a remarkable synergy that InfoPath, most notably, makes possible. The message payloads exchanged on the Web services network, and the documents read and written by people, can be the same texts, governed by the same datatype and structure definitions. And those texts are universal in scope, not tied to any platform or framework. True, InfoPath is a Windows-only creature, but since it's built on open standards, InfoPath-like software can exist on other platforms and can interoperate with InfoPath.

Yes, exactly. Sadly, I'm still waiting for that other tool to show up somewhere ...