I always end up looking like an asshole because even though I'm a high technology guy I'm also always saying "hey, calm down, this looks like it's lot more complicated than the ad and the staged demo make it look"
Is it having a universal parser? Actually xml kind of did solve that problem. You could easily exchange data without having to write a parser and as long as the data was mostly text, it was fine.
But that's all it solved. It made it so you didn't have to write a new parser. You still had to figure out on a schema to serialize and deserialize though. And you needed to parse non-scalars.