eBay Exits Passport

January 19, 2005

Remember .NET? The cutting edge, unifying, all encompassing platform Microsoft launched a few years ago?
It was perhaps one of the most confusing and blurry marketing ideas ever to come out of Redmond. And no matter how hard Microsoft tried to clarify this grand vision, the befuddlement just got worse. Finally Microsoft threw in the towel and backtracked on calling everything under the sun, "everything under the sun".NET.

Along with the .NET hoopla, the Passport service was being showcased as the de-facto authentication scheme. It would allow third party Web sites to login users through Passport and leave the authentication and access job to Microsoft. The idea wasn't new by any means. Single sign-on has been the aspiration of the authentication industry for decades, but alas, Passport wasn't meant to be the proverbial silver bullet.

eBay was one of the more prominent companies who initially signed up for Passport services in addition to their own authentication method. But I always wondered, why would a vendor entrust its valuable customer information to Microsoft. I guess eBay must have been having the same doubts. As of January 24th, they are dropping the Passport service from their login screen. If not the death knell, this is a giant blow to an already waning product.

Meanwhile .NET has mostly been forgotten by the public, save one area. It is still much alive in the development community and with the next version of .NET development Framework 2.0, and Visual Studio 2005 on the horizon, it has the development community, myself included, abuzz. The .NET vision has never been clearer.