I agree with Erik about XML. When I first was introduced to it (by Ken Levy) I knew I would be big. Not because Ken was giving the lecture, he always makes things seem more brilliant, but it solved several of my current Web problems, mainly transfering tables of information between different suppliers.

I also agree that ADO doesn't give us any additional advantages (actually it has disadvantages) over ODBC except the object model stuff and the advantage of using RDO for Internet data access.

Remember ODBC is now old technology, ADO/RDO is new, therefore it must be better.