Article:		Why O'Reilly and .NET?
Subject:		Hard To Imagine A Day When Passport Account Is Necessary
Date:		2001-06-04 10:32:43
From:		generaluse
The last person commenting said: "Throwing a tantrum and throwing toys from the pram isn't going to help when you need a Microsoft Passport account to buy stuff from your favourite site." Looking at it from a practical standpoint I hardly can see the day when a Passport account will become important. There might be a few merchants that use it but they will find out they are losing the business of persons wary of creating such an account. A lot of people out there a concerned about their privacy and once the rumors start going around that MS is using Passport to invade their privacy and control the world and so on...Passport won't stand a chance. Imagine how paranoid some people already about about simple web cookies. Haha. They even sell cookie-cleaning privacy software to the masses. There is a certain "coolness" factor to things in this world and right now .Net and Passport are hot news items because they are new but looking down the road 10 years they could quite possibly be looked upon as being "cool" as Microsoft's Clippy and Bob, WFC, J++. Gee, now those were so cool! LOL. Honestly, we're having to move all our office computers over to Linux just to get away from this endless cycle of foolishness. MS already perfected their desktop years ago and since has been screwing it up with special menu effects and other time-wasting drool. They lack innovation and their's really nothing truly new in .Net or anything else they are suggesting they lots of others have not thought of implementing.

Showing messages 1 through 3 of 3.

• Hard To Imagine A Day When Passport Account Is Necessary
  2001-06-04 14:51:32  jregel [Reply | View]
  
  
  I wish I shared your optimism. Remember that most users are not like us - they are happy to have MSN as their start page etc. Consider how many people use Hotmail despite the known security problems. The geeks and techies won't like Hailstorm (the .NET vision that extends Passport to become the central authentication server on the net), and we won't support it (or will we? How many people here are using IE because it makes surfing easier?). But I'm afraid that we are a tiny minority. There are millions of users who will blindly lap up the ease of use that Microsoft promise.
  
  I hope that the other big companies like Sun and IBM kick up a stink about it, and maybe get the DOJ involved - I know that a lot of Americans are against government intervention, but when you have a US company that is out of control, you need to do something to reign it in.
  
  The Open Source community need to make some response to the .NET platform. I've spent a fair amount of time recently looking into .NET and there are several Open Source projects that go some way to providing alternatives, but they all lack the sense of "vision" and integration.
  
  Microsoft have realised that they cannot compete with Linux et al in the long term, and have instead decided to move the goal posts completely. The "war" is moving from the desktop onto the net. At the moment, Microsoft are trying to create a proprietary internet, masked behind the guise of open standards, while a close examination reveals that they intend to be the gatekeepers of all the critical points. Hailstorm is the first indicator of this strategy. We *NEED* a response.
• Hard To Imagine A Day When Passport Account Is Necessary
  2002-03-08 00:01:06  dave123 [Reply | View]
  
  
  
  all the technologies should be free.
  don't be a MS slave
  
• Hard To Imagine A Day When Passport Account Is Necessary
  2002-03-07 23:34:41  dave123 [Reply | View]
  
  
  
  all the technologies should be free.
  don't be a MS slave