Reports of death of MS Passport exaggerated

Another hare started from Mary Branscombe’s InfoCard piece. Chris Overd emails to point out that its first sentence "is rather misleading. InfoCard is not, in any shape or form, a replacement for Microsoft Passport". In support, he points at a blog posting from Trevin Chow here. Well, that seems fair enough, but all I can …

[Mary Branscombe]

Perhaps the best word is successor?

InfoCard isn't Passport 2.0 and Passport isn't going away - but I certainly hope that InfoCards and the new security policy guidelines will improve the Passport experience!

I do think of the ideas behind InfoCard and the identity metasystem as a replacement for the ideas behind Passport. It's a replacement for the existing version in the sense that MSN et al will at least supplement their use of Passport with InfoCard logins that will be part of the identity metasystem if other sites choose to honour them - but it certainly doesn't work the same way or do the same thing and the Passport team is adding infoCard to Passport rather than dropping the Passport system.

I didn't have space to go into the claims handling and other basic functionality of InfoCard, which make it very different from Passport per se. The way I think of it - and the way Kim Cameron phrases it when people hail him as the slayer of Passport - is that that he was one in a long line of people to explain what was wrong with Passport and that acknowledgement led to a search for what would be right.