* Microsoft shrinks Passport's ambitions
Not with a bang, but a whimper. That appears to be how Microsoft’s Passport application/service will exit the scene.
Not with a bang, but a whimper. That appears to be how Microsoft’s Passport application/service will exit the scene.
In a story published last week, the IDG News Service reported that Microsoft is “recasting ambitions for its .Net Passport identification system, saying the service now will be limited to its own online offerings and those of close partners. Microsoft no longer sees Passport as a single sign-on system for the Web at large, a spokeswoman said.”
That’s a far cry from the way the service was introduced back in 1999. Then, Redmond envisioned thousands of online stores and other services using Passport, allowing users to sign on using the same user name and password combination used for Microsoft’s desktop and Windows server-based services as well as its Internet sites such as MSN and Hotmail. It was a precursor to today’s single sign-on products.
Two years later, with the release of Passport 2.0, Microsoft hoped to launch what it had codenamed the “HailStorm” technology. Passport was to be the authentication service for the personal data repository that was HailStorm. As Microsoft extolled it at the time: “HailStorm is designed to place individuals at the center of their computing experience and take control over the technology in their lives and better protect the privacy of their personal information. HailStorm services will allow unprecedented collaboration and integration between the users’ devices, their software and their personal data. With HailStorm, users will have even greater and more specific control over what people, businesses and technologies have access to their personal information.”
What Microsoft didn’t mention, and what huge numbers of people became alarmed about, was that all of the personal data would be stored on computers controlled not by the user, but by Microsoft.
At the time, Microsoft was in the midst of the anti-trust trial brought by the U.S. government and news of crackers stealing credit card numbers and social security numbers seemed to be in the press every week. There were also the monthly stories about corporations selling clients’ data to third parties for marketing purposes. People not only wanted to better protect their personal information, they wanted it under lock and key within their own hardware. It was not a good time for Microsoft to launch this initiative.
In response to HailStorm, Sun launched a group consisting of mostly consumer businesses to create their own reduced sign-on system, which was dubbed the Liberty Alliance. The group now dominates the field for Web-based sharing of data in a technology now called “federated identity.”
Microsoft tried to save Passport, if not all of HailStorm, by trotting out a revamped service called “.NetMyServices.” Like most of the .Net titles, though, it failed to arouse any interest among users. And if the users weren’t interested, then the Web sites looking to attract those users weren’t interested either.
Passport also suffered from being a directory-like service that was based on neither Active Directory nor Microsoft’s Metadirectory Services (now called Microsoft Identity Information Service).
While it will still be available with MSN and Hotmail, Passport appears to be on the road to oblivion, after starting out with great promise. It’s useful, once in a while, to realize that not every initiative Microsoft launches engulfs the world.
