Passport in a coma

Microsoft's Passport is limiting its single sign on to its own properties and close partners, according to a Microsoft representative.

Perhaps that's for the best.

Passport had a grand plan of being the defacto method of signing in to dozens of websites, in order to streamline the sharing of personal information with trusted third parties. The plan had some merit. When Passport was released, back in 1999 Hotmail had accumulated over 300+MM users and was intended to be the backbone of the system. The concept of being an infomediary, or trusted holder of personal information, had been made popular by John Hagel in his book Net Gain, and traction was growing to serve a very fragmented commercial landscape with hundreds of different online merchants.

Microsoft even had some traction getting a few merchants signed up and onboarding all of their online properties over the next year.

So what happened? well, a few things occurred that stymied Microsoft's plan (this is be conjecturing here...). First, 300+MM hotmail accounts does not equal 300M+ people; only a moderate (I am guessing here) percentage were loyal hotmail users. Many people didn't shop online or feel the need for quick login via passport. Online commerce became less fragmented with Amazon and ebay reaping the majority of the benefits. Merchants weren't a big fan of Microsoft knowing information about their customer and customer behavior, so merchant signups slowed. I also got the feeling that people didn't have enough comfort (with Microsoft or anyone else for that matter) to provide their personal information (including CC#, etc.) for a service that promoted the idea of information sharing, even if people knew that it was to be used for a specific purpose.

So, now they have scaled back the service and limited it to their own sites and a few close partners. My guess is that eventually the close partners will discontinue the service as well. For the few number of people who are active users, signing up directly with the merchant for continued service will be a small hiccup in their online lives. If you agree or disagree, please do let me know.