Passport failure shows the folly of Microsoft's ways
Published: 04 Jan 2005 14:25 GMT
Christmas is always a good opportunity to bury bad news while prying eyes are distracted by presents and turkey. Last year Sun canned its Cobalt brand. This year, it seems, the festive period was a good time for Microsoft to bury Passport, its much-trumpeted single sign-on service.
Microsoft made the admission on the quietest week of the year, and even then only after eBay -- Microsoft's biggest partner both financially and by number of participating sites -- brought down the hammer on the final nail. Now, Microsoft will stop trying to persuade Web sites to use the service, and instead will just continue to use it for its own properties.
We can point to any number of reasons for Passport failing as the hub of identity management on the Web. There are the early issues with security, which saw some users logged on to bogus Hotmail accounts, while others were asked to install patches for IE; there were the charges that Microsoft was attempting to abuse its desktop monopoly, using such tactics as shutting out browsers other than IE, and requiring users to sign up for Passport accounts to access features in beta versions of Windows XP; there were concerns of privacy activists; and there was even an investigation by the Federal Trade Commission. For whatever reason, consumer simply failed to embrace it.
Whatever the cause, Microsoft's miscalculations have failed and left the way clear for the industry-led Liberty Alliance's standard, which has become the base for the next version of the security assertion markup language, or SAML 2.0. The Liberty Alliance's model works differently from Passport: instead of a single authority, SAML services allow partners to share secure access by letting a person who signs in to one server access any other partner's server without having to sign in again.
Passport is not quite dead, but for the industry as a whole it is now irrelevant. Microsoft has the resources to try to resurrect Passport, but it would do better to swallow some pride along with its humble pie and join the Liberty Alliance. Whatever it does, the company should now recognise that might alone is no longer enough to make people use its technologies -- these days, you need friends.
Who knows, perhaps the next stop will be the anti-spam Sender Policy Framework, where again Microsoft has been at odds with the wider tech community. Cooperation, not monopolisation, is the way to deal with today's biggest technology challenges.
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