Microsoft scales back Passport ambitions

IDG News Service - Microsoft Corp. is recasting ambitions for its .Net Passport identification system, saying the service will now be limited to its own online offerings and those of close partners. Microsoft no longer sees Passport as a single-sign-on system for the Web at large, a spokeswoman said.
Microsoft's repositioning of Passport comes as careers Web site Monster.com said it's dropping support of the authentication service. New York-based Monster Worldwide Inc. was one of Microsoft's banner Passport users.
Passport was once a key part of its hosted services strategy, but Microsoft has been silent about it in the past few years and hasn't done any significant development work on the system. Instead, the company has been quietly scaling back several of Passport's components. A directory of sites that support the service was removed this year, and in March 2003, a payments feature was axed.
Passport clearly isn't all that Microsoft made it out to be. In 1999, the company envisioned thousands of online stores and other services using Passport, allowing users to sign with the same username and password combination used for Microsoft services. But Web site operators balked at the idea of having Microsoft control access to their sites. Aside from Microsoft-owned sites, only a few dozen others signed on to Passport.
Microsoft has "learned a lot" over the past few years from working with partners and customers using Passport and has adjusted its ambitions for the service accordingly, said Brooke Richardson, lead product manager for MSN at Microsoft.
"Going forward, the mission of the Microsoft Passport service will be to provide authentication services to Microsoft services and products and to Microsoft partners," she said late Tuesday in an e-mail response to a reporter's questions.
Cutting Passport ambitions is part of Microsoft returning to its software roots, said Matt Rosoff, an analyst at Kirkland, Wash.-based Directions on Microsoft Inc. "Microsoft's interest in hosted services has decreased since 2001," he said. "The company's focus has returned to software, which is where it belongs."
In 2001, Microsoft announced that eBay Inc. and Monster would adopt Passport, making them two of only a handful of big-name companies Microsoft was able to sell on the service. Monster is cutting Passport this week, and although eBay continues to support the technology, it's hardly used, spokesmen for the respective companies said.
"Based on the adoption rates of Passport, which represented a low percentage of Monster users worldwide, a decision was made to make the most effective use of resources within Monster" and end support for Passport, said Monster