Shipping News

I guess my all time favorite quote on software engineering would be, and no its not "build security in" but that's on the list, my favorite quote would be "real artists ship", so that makes this news courtesy Pamela Dingle, doubly disappointing:

Microsoft announced last Tuesday that CardSpace 2.0 beta would not be releasing at the same time as ADFS 2.0.  That fact may not have immediate significance to you, but it certainly does to me.  Microsoft, you’ve blown it.

On one hand, I’m immensely relieved. A premature release of CardSpace 2.0 would have removed personal card support from the desktop, meaning that CardSpace would have been relegated to nothing more than Home Realm discovery.

On the other hand…  We won’t know for sure until ADFS 2.0 ships, but from what I and other people have seen from the beta and release candidate versions, Microsoft has broken backward compatibility with CardSpace 1.0.  This means that unless Microsoft has taken recent steps to regress their information card issuance code, ADFS 2.0 will ship in information card limbo

Why is this a big deal? In a word: adoption.

But see, people were waiting.  Big companies, waiting to run information card pilots.  Governments, excited to use ADFS 2.0 to implement higher-assurance consumer identity projects.  There weren’t a huge number of interested parties, but dammit, they were BIG interested parties.  Those interested parties need a sustainable closed circle — a production server and a production client.   Not a production server that can only work with a client that “isn’t done yet”.

The Web is still waiting for the critical mass of players to work together. As Pamela says it creates an opportunity for small players to build shims, but I don't think anyone assumed there'd ever be just one vendor here, there would always be room for niche players to deliver an extra 10%, however it would have been excellent for Microsoft to ship an integrated solution to really get the party started.