In his recent article entitled Binary Killed the XML Star? Kendall Clark writes

Many XML proponents and users came out of various binary exchange and format camps, and they are very unwilling to return to what were for them, or so it would seem, dark days. In this case, however, given the real power of those who most seem to want a binary variant -- including Sun, IBM, and Microsoft -- they may have to adopt a carefully tactical plan to limit the damage, rather than preventing the fight completely.

This claim by Kendall Clark seems to contradict the conclusions in the postion papers provided by both Microsoft and IBM at the The W3C Workshop on Binary Interchange of XML Information Item Sets.

IBM's position paper concludes with

IBM believes that wherever possible, implementations of the existing XML 1.x Recommendation should be optimized to meet the needs of customers. While we expect to see non-standard binary forms used internally within certain vendors’ implementations, including perhaps our own, we are not yet convinced that there is justification to standardize an interchange format other than XML 1.x. We thus believe that it would be premature for the W3C to launch a formal workgroup, or to recharter an existing group, to develop a Binary XML Recommendation

Microsoft's position paper concludes with

For different classes of applications, the criterion (minimize footprint or minimize parse/generate time) for the binary representation is different and often conflicting. There is no single criterion that optimizes all applications. Consequently, a binary standard could result in a suite of allowable representations that clients and servers must be prepared to receive and process. This is a retrograde step from the portability goals of XML 1.0. Furthermore, the optimal binary representation depends on the machine and OS architectures on each end — translating between binary representations negates much of the advantages that binary XML has over text.

Besides the position paper from Microsoft there've have been many comments both in Weblogs and mailing lists from Microsoft people against this movement for a standardized binary XML format (oxymoron that it is). There have been weblog posts by myself, Joshua Allen and Omri Gazitt (all of whom work on XML technologies at Microsoft) decrying the movement towards binary XML and thus potential fragmentation of the XML world.

There have also been a number of posts by Microsoft employees against  standardized binary XML on mailing list such as XML-DEV some of which have been quoted on Elliotte Rusty Harold's Cafe con Leche XML News website

I fear that splitting the interop story of XML into a textual and Infoset-based/binary representation, we are going to get the "divide and conquer" effect that in the end will make XML just another ASN.1: a niche model that does not deliver the interop it promises and we will be back to lock-in.

--Michael Rys on the xml-dev mailing list, Tue, 18 Nov 2003

XML has succeeded in large part because it is text and because it is perceived as "the obvious choice" to many people. The world was a lot different before XML came around, when people had to choose between a dizzying array of binary and text syntaxes (including ASN.1). Anyone who tries to complicate and fragment this serendipitous development is, IMO, insane.

--Joshua Allen on the xml-dev mailing list, Tue, 18 Nov 2003

Unfortunately, it seems that Kendall Clark must have missed the various discussions, weblog posts and the position paper where Microsoft's view of the importance of textual XML 1.0 were put forth.