Day: December 2, 2004

Responding to the Third Law, Dave Kearns asks Is it time for personal directory? He is clearly a long-time champion of this, as am I.

I&#39ve been spending quite a bit of time looking into Dave&#39s long history of serious pieces at NetworkWorldFusion. In terms of personal directory, he did a great series on SMBMeta (proposed by Dan Bricklin of VisiCalc and the seminal Dan Bricklin&#39s Demo Program).

I need to finish off the Laws of Identity but want to come back to this discussion. Dave has made some pretty Kearnesque comments on my investigation of the identity aspects of Bluetooth. Bad news: I&#39m going to come back to them – and not just Bluetooth, but all of wireless networking. But I hope I will get Dave interested too, because I think we can actually get these things fixed and brought into line with the Laws of Identity.

 

OK – my position must seem supercilious – for Craig says:

I didn&#39t miss the point. I nailed it. Passport was never–at least not until now–billed as an experiment. Passport was positioned as the future of Identity infrastructure. This so frightened the industry that a hasty alternative was financed and brought to life–behold–the Liberty Alliance.

Gee – Was I just rewriting history? Airbrush and all? Let me be more specific. I&#39m not talking about ‘billing’.

It was clear to me from day one that Passport was not going to become a universal identity system. But though I expressed my opinions inside Microsoft, I was not directly involved in the Passport or Hailstorm initiatives. In an innovative environment, you often have to go with the flow and let passionate people test their ideas. The testing includes – as you know only too well – positioning. Sometimes passionate people will be right, and sometimes they&#39ll be wrong.

So, I saw Passport as an experiment.

What is incredible is that others in the industry looked at all of this and – being as ignorant of the Third Law as were the very proponents of Passport – they had no understanding that objective factors would stem the tide of Passport for generalized identity purposes.

It is said that this is what gave rise to Liberty. I cede to your analysis here – though I know some of the good people involved and that there were some positive reasons for people to come together as well as negative ones.