Getting involved with M

I spent last week in Redmond talking to Microsoft about M and Oslo.  The question at the back of my mind before I went was "Does M really have the potential in the long term to be an interesting and useful alternative to XML?".  My tentative answer is yes.  Here's why:

• Although M, as it is today, is interesting in a number of ways, it is obviously a long way from being a serious alternative to XML (at least for the kinds of application I am interested in). One of my concerns was that I would hear "It's too late to change that". I never did: I was pleasantly surprised that Microsoft are still willing to make fundamental changes to M.
• Microsoft recognize that M's long-term potential would be severely limited if it was a proprietary, Microsoft-only technology.  I believe they realize that M needs to end up as a genuinely open standard.  They've already made initial steps towards a more open process for M. On the other hand, they don't believe in design by committee.  (And having seen some of the abominations that design by committee can produce, I can certainly sympathise with that.) There's a senior Microsoft guy that gets to make the final call on all design decisions. In other words, it's a benevolent dictator model.  I'm OK with this in principle (although I like it even better when I'm the benevolent dictator).  I think it's worked really well in a number of cases (C# and Python spring to mind).  But obviously it all depends on the qualities of the particular benevolent dictator.  From my interactions so far, he seems like a really smart guy and he's willing to listen.
• Microsoft is addressing the whole stack.  An alternative to XML needs to provide not only an alternative to XML itself but also alternatives to XSD/RELAX NG and XQuery/XSLT.
• Microsoft seem to be designing things in a principled way; they are paying attention to the relevant CS theory. For example, ML seems to be a major influence. They are making an effort to produce something clean, elegant, even beautiful, rather than doing just enough to get a product out.
• Microsoft seem willing to take documents seriously. This is a make or break issue for me, because the kind of data I care about most is documents and M, as it is today, is not useful for documents. This was probably the issue we spent the most time on; I talked a lot about the importance of mixed content. One of the Microsoft team suggested the goal of using M to do the M specification.  I think this sort of dogfooding will be very helpful in ensuring M works well for documents.

Of course, it's early days yet, and it's hard to tell how much leverage M will get, but there's enough potential to make me want to be involved.