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Public Passport potentially put out to pasture

Looks like Microsoft is finally publicly acknowledging that Passport isn't going to fly, and will be used only by Microsoft and key partners. Thank goodness.

I'm a good sport and have always used Passport on sites that supported it -- and it's almost always been a hassle. The problem is compounded if you need to have more than one Passport. (Don't get me started.)

Microsoft scales back Passport ambitions [InfoWorld]
Posted: Oct 21 2004, 08:39 AM by jeffreykey | with 4 comment(s)
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Comments

Brian Carlisle said:

In most cases, Microsoft has been pretty savvy in realizing it has to please its developers in order to get Microsoft technology in broad general use. Passport's licensing expense was only usable for the largest of web sites. I think a number of smaller web sites would have liked to use the technology had it not been priced out of reach.
# October 21, 2004 10:31 AM

Jeff Key said:

Agree. I never touched it because I'd heard that the cheapest (developer?) license was in the tens of thousands. I wouldn't call that "enticing"..
# October 21, 2004 10:36 AM

Jeremy Brayton said:

That makes me wonder where that money was going. Infrastructure upgrades? Was Passport a huge service to burden? I think someone was lining their pockets but I could be wrong.

I'm willing to bet there's going to be some sort of Passport 2.0 though at some point in time. They may scale it back, but the idea will never die.
# October 22, 2004 2:01 PM

Sahil Malik said:

What I always wondered was -- what really prevented me from running a login form that looked *exactly* like passport and ran it off a russian server? I'd crack your passport then right? complete with credit card info; if you had it in there, and msdn universal and ebay and this and that ..
# October 29, 2004 1:59 PM