Passport authentication was built into Microsoft Web services such as its Hotmail email service and The Zone gaming site, and the company unveiled plans to resell Passport services to other sites as part of a broad consumer Web services strategy.
A few years later, only a few major sites support Passport sign-in as an option. The only sign of Passport at auction site eBay, touted as an initial backer of the service, is hidden deep within a customer support index.
Slow take-up
The tepid reception for Passport stemmed from a number of causes, analysts said, beginning with a lack of customer interest. The big promise of Passport was that it would simplify shopping by allowing folks to use the same sign-on for multiple shopping sites. But when was the last time you chose an online merchant based on their authentication procedure?
"Microsoft was kind of pushing Passport for a problem that didn't exist," Pescatore said. "There just aren't a lot of natural economies where there are going to be benefits to the consumer to have single sign-on. If I'm on eBay, am I really going to go straight to United to buy plane tickets? Consumers didn't see the benefit, and businesses aren't going to sink any money into it until they see how it's going to increase revenue."
Any efforts by Microsoft to convince customers that single sign-on was a big deal were undermined by a string of embarrassing glitches. Problems with Passport servers have resulted in long interruptions in Microsoft service. A serious security flaw in Passport put personal data and credit card information for thousands of customers at risk of being hijacked. And Microsoft endured a public spat with the European Union that put significant restrictions on what data Microsoft can collect.
The upshot was that even businesses that were interested in simplifying their sign-on processes didn't get too excited about the idea of putting everything on a Microsoft server.
"It's not isolated to just issues with Passport security but (is related to) Microsoft's record in the large," said Gerry Gebel, an analyst for research firm The Burton Group. "Businesses like to maintain their autonomy, and they became especially concerned about leaving everything to Microsoft."
"It proved to be far more complicated than Microsoft imagined," Rosoff noted. "Passport became this poisoned service under a lot of scrutiny from regulators." All the restrictions, combined with lack of interest from third-party vendors, suggest that, within the next year or so, "they're going to scale it way back," he said. "I can't imagine a Web site today being willing to pay $10,000 (£5,425) a year and go through the whole process necessary to implement Passport."
