Your response appears to be the most relevant to my question. Some of the
other responses appear way off the mark as far as my question (especially the
guy talking about "Goto". Thanks. I'm very curious whether I can use xml
with the Spreadsheet component. We'll see.

" wrote:

1. For starters, with a few exceptions, MVPs post on
microsoft.public.* newsgroups.

Some MVPs are microsoft buffs who prefer not to use groups.google.com,
and some of these guys prefer to post from microsoft sites.

2. While many MVP's have decades of experience using Office, many
don't have experience developing with other tools such as Visual
Studio (as in developing COM objects or WebParts) or Sharepoint (as in
developing dashboards that use spreadsheets as their source of
information).

MVPs are retired guys and book writers, mostly. So you won't see them
going into Office Components if they are retired, and they won't go
into unless a publisher asks them to write a book on a hot Office
Component topic.

3. Some developers would take issue with your declaration that the
future gravitating to Web Services. It *might* be the case that B2B is
migrating to Web Services, but that's about it. But within the
enterprise it's easier to pass around database connections and assign
read and write permission within the database.

4. Excel has had on-again-off again support for SOAP and XML. Some of
the support for XML is half baked. For example if you Data-Import-
XML and drag and drop transform that looks great, but you can't apply
that transform to an XML file that has hundreds of elements with each
element requiring a transform, so the functionality is mostly useless.
(I haven't tried Excel 2008 though.)

5. There is no evidence that enterprise companies are using Google
spreadsheets. My understanding is that you can fill a Google
spreadsheet with millions of numbers on the back end with Python -
well, need I say more? How many Office/Python developers are migrating
to Google spreadsheets.

If you *really* want to do UNIX and spreadsheets you can use OS X, MS
Office for OS X, AppleScript, and VBA.

6. .NET is a popular platform. Dice it for yourself. If you're a .NET
wiz you can get a dream job (just like you might if you have a lot of
experience with Java).