That was the plan a few years ago, when the software giant began pitching its Passport online authentication service as a cure-all for what was ailing online shopping. The company expected to sell Passport services to thousands of online vendors, making your Microsoft-stored password and the extensive personal and financial information behind it all you needed to do business on the Internet.
The reality has turned out to be considerably less expansive. Passport use is limited to Microsoft-owned sites and a handful of close partners, thanks to a combination of customer apathy, high-profile Microsoft glitches and credible competition from the industry-backed Liberty Alliance.
Analysts now say Passport is likely to become little more than part of Microsoft's Internet infrastructure over the next year, with broader plans to manage identity information now deferred until Longhorn, the next version of the Windows operating system.
"There doesn't seem to be a huge role for Passport -- certainly not the role that was sketched out for it two or three years ago," said Matt Rosoff, an analyst for research firm Directions on Microsoft. "I expect at some point, Microsoft is going to say Passport is for Microsoft sites and close partners and leave it at that."
"The market largely rejected a proprietary, tied-to-Microsoft approach," Gartner analyst John Pescatore said. "We've actually seen the Liberty Alliance keep moving forward and get some traction in a variety of places, where Passport has pretty much remained a Microsoft, under-the-covers thing."
Microsoft representatives declined repeated requests to comment for this story. "There's nothing new to talk about," one representative said, while insisting that Microsoft remains committed to Passport.
Aside from dealing with occasional outages, Microsoft executives have not spoken about Passport for months.
The software maker acquired the technology for Passport when it bought Firefly Network in April 1998. It relaunched the service a year later as part of a broad e-commerce strategy.
