It seems that the decision by eBay to drop Microsoft's Passport service that we reported on earlier in the week has finally sent Microsoft over the edge, and the Redmond based software giant has decided to stop flogging the dead horse that is their Passport service, and will no longer offer it's Passport service to third party companies to use.
The idea of the Passport sign on service seemed a pretty good one. Users would have one single centrally managed identity that they would be able to use across pretty much any site on the Internet that chose to adopt the Passport service. No more worrying about multiple user names and passwords, just pop in your Passport ID and away you went. In theory this would also make life easier for the multitude of sites that were supposed to adopt the Passport service, negating their need to manage user identities.
Of course, as with any system such as this, so much depended on it being adopted as a global standard. Microsoft are not necessarily hugely popular across the world, and their security record is less than gleaming. Users and site owners were nervous about entrusting all their security details to one organisation, especially as this information could have included credit card details and the like. So Microsoft did not get the wide acceptance of the Passport system that it wanted.
Naturally the idea of a centrally located identity managed by a huge faceless corporation had the privacy people up in arms, and the thought that Microsoft was going to start owning the global Internet based transaction framework had pretty much everyone else up in arms, so Microsoft were faced with a huge uphill battle from the start, one which it seemed they were destined to lose.
Passport looks like it will end up doing what most people see it doing at the moment, managing Hotmail logins and the Messenger service. No doubt Microsoft will be thinking up new ways to take over the Internet, but in the meantime it looks like we'll be keeping with the traditional system of a different username and password system for every site we visit.
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