Asphalt and Cars Clarified

The good folks over at Between the Lines blogged Digital ID World (here, here, and here)including my speech from Wednesday morning, which is pretty cool. I always find it amazing when people blog conferences in real time like this, and BTL did a good job of capturing a lot of what went on at DIDW.

I do, however, want to clarify one thing that Chris Jablonski said in his post summarizing my keynote. Chris summarized something I said this way:

However, he cautioned that achieving meaningful implementation by the end of the decade will depend on how long the vendors want to fight over building the road (standard framework) as opposed to building neat cars and trucks (more proprietary solutions).

Actually, the “neat cars and trucks” aren’t proprietary systems in the analogy I was using. My point was this: Arguments over the chemical composition of asphalt (the protocols necessary to build the standard framework) is of little value to customers who need a solution to a very real problem. What customers want is products and services that solve their identity problems (the cars and trucks that actually help people get somewhere) but that work in an interoperable system (cars that run on the public road). So in the analogy, I was trying to encourage the vendors to quit arguing over how to build the road, settle on what asphalt formula we’ll use, and focus instead on building the interoperable solutions that solve a real problem, which customers will want to buy.

And in that light, the interoperability profile for Web-based SSO between Liberty and the WS-* frameworks that Sun and Microsoft announced today are certainly encouraging. More on that later.