Dear Steve,
I recently visited Redmond to meet with the Federated Identity group. We had a long chat about Context-aware applications and the trends toward context automation. Of course, those of us thinking along these lines would love to get ahead of the hacking curve and put some identity infrastructure around the contextual internet.
The wonderful work led by Kim Cameron and Microsoft provide the perfect framework for such identity infrastructure. The Identity Metasystem—with CardSpace and CardSpace alternatives—is the only viable identity infrastructure for the Internet and subsequently for context automation.
Given that, CardSpace still needs to mature to be a viable selector for context-aware computing. You know, innovation?
In our meeting, we discussed how many man hours it would take to modify CardSpace to support context-automation. The answer is a few days of work at the most. When asked how long before such a simple change would find its way into CardSpace, the answer came back as two years at best, maybe.
Steve, two years for simple updates.
As we drove further down to path to understand why, we were told the following unbelievable conversation. (The following is not an exact quote, but close.)
Changes like you are requesting can only happen in an “in-band” release of Windows. These sort of changes are prohibited from going out in the Tuesday updates.
What goes out with in-band releases the Tuesday updates is controlled by—Steve Ballmer.
Well F*&% me. Dude, after all of these years, you are still micro managing the Windows release!
Now I know why Microsoft is now been relegated to insignificance in the identity market.
The reason is simple. Internal policy, managed by you, prohibits product mangers from keeping up with trends and innovation.
Let me repeat, if the Federated Identity Group made the required changes to the CardSpace selector today, it will be two years—maybe longer—before it makes it to the market.
The bottleneck to this problem—and I suspect a slew of others—is you.
As your friend and long-time competitor/advisor on these issues, I urge you to rethink how this is works. Because it isn’t working.
You are really good at many things, this is not one of them.
As it stands, Microsoft has been relegated to such insignificance in this issue and—at this point— it won’t matter one way or the other if y0u get out of the way and Microsoft addresses the problem. But it would sure be easier—and better for the customer.
Sincerely,
Craig Burton
PS. If y0u want to find out what is happening on the edge of context automation, send some people to Kynetx Impact in November.