Dick Hardt from Sxip Identity draws our attention to a new light weight identity solution from, your not going to believe this, 3M! I agree with Dave Wiener’s point that the emerging Internet generation treats identity in fundimentally new ways, so while this solution is not conformant with standards, on many levels, it is both long tail, user centric, and quite sticky. Update: you may need to widen to get the big picture.
This column in a NYC alternative weekly is just wonderful. I’m subscribe to it using google alerts.
There is an encomium to Lotus in the Boston paper today. I worked at Lotus back in the 1980s; during the era when Microsoft killed them or, if you prefer, they committed suicide. Lotus made bad choices about where to make their home. They died because they failed to pick the right answer to the multihoming problem. Of course there are plenty of other aspects to the story, but that’s its core and everything else is noise.
During that era I recall chatting with what we would now call the CTO of a company we went on to acquire. I asked him why he had decided to expend vast resources on keeping his product platform independent rather then on features for his users. This question was a lead up to a question about how he viewed what I’d now call the ‘plausible premise’ of each of the platforms he was supporting. His three
platforms were, if I correctly recall, in order of plausibility: Mac. Motif, and the Window 1.0. As a glimpse into my point about how Lotus was getting these questions wrong at the time it was a bone of contention that he didn’t have a OS/2 port.
He answer was “I have no idea which one will survive.” It’s a glimpse into how naive we were as an industry back then that this answer surprised and delighted me. It became a bit of a cliche for me. To say “Which of these platforms is going to survive.” in planning meetings was surprisingly provocative. The kind of thing that gets people to asking if you’re a team player.
Multihoming is costly. (Ben recalls at this point the misery of failing to learn a foreign language in high school.) These day, for example, it’s damn expensive to support both soap and rest APIs for your web services. You need to support both for the prosaic reason I thought the CTO would raise, i.e. to get access to the maximum number of users. But you also need to support both because you don’t know which will survive.
Most of my technically informed readers can not imagine that one or the other of those could possible die off. Holding that thought in mind you are recreating a bit of what the world looked like when somebody would float the idea that X11/Motif, or OS/2 might die off.
Engineer for serendipity. — Roy Fielding
Brilliant. More delightful then what I call creating large option spaces.
Surprisingly hard to get funded though.
Today I noticed this ad offering to reimburse you for getting a passport. $157 per adult. I felt some sympathy for the advertiser, an island in the Caribbean. A place people go for the weekend; well they used to. The island tourism folks woke up recently to discover that numbers where down and they have discovered that the newly increased tedium of getting a passport has caused huge numbers of idle travelers to decided to, well, just go someplace else.
When my 1st son got his learner’s permit it took us three trips to the registry before we managed to accumulate enough documentation to convince them to let him have the learner’s permit. My 2nd son submitted his first pay check’s stub rather than the check and the bank called to correct the error. A bit got set on his account that didn’t get cleared. So the ATM ate his bank card. It took months to get a replacement card since his school was yet to issue the ID card they required. All N of my financial institutions have recently insisted that I add four security questions, including one involving a photograph; which is a pain since I share access to these accounts with my spouse so all 30 odd questions and their answers all have to be in some shared location. We recently got new passports, a project that was at least a dozen times more expensive and tedious than doing my taxes.
I once had a web product that failed big-time. A major contributor to that failure was tedium of getting new users through the sign-up process. Each screen they had to step triggered the lost of 10 to 20% of the users. Reducing the friction of that process was key to survival. It is a thousand times easier to get a cell phone or a credit card than it is to get a passport or a learner’s permit. That wasn’t the case two decades ago.
The Republicans have done a lot of work over the last decade to make it harder to vote; creating additional friction in the process of getting to the polling booth. The increased barriers for getting a drivers license, passport, etc. are all part of that. This make sense because now, unlike 30 years ago, there is now a significant difference in the wealth of Democratic v.s. Republican voters.
Public health experts have done a lot of work over the decades to create barrier between the public and dangerous items and to lower barriers to access to constructive ones. So we make it harder to get liquor, and easier to get condoms. Traffic calming techniques are another example of engineering that makes makes a system run more slowly.
I find these attempts to shift the temperature of entire systems fascinating. This is at the heart of what your doing when you write standards, but it’s entirely scale free. Ideas like this are behind the intuition of some managers who insist on getting everybody in the team working in the same room with no walls between them.
In the sphere of internet identity it is particularly puzzling how two counter vialing forces are at work. One trying to raise the friction and one trying to lower it. Privacy and security advocates are attempting to lower the temp. and increase the friction. Thus you get the mess around the passport, real-id, and the banks. Wearing that hat it seems perfectly reasonable that one should present photo id when you vote, or have your biometrics captured if you cross a boarder. On the other hand there are those who seek in the solution to the internet identity problem a way to raise the temperature and lower the friction. That more rather than less transactions would take place. That more blog postings garner good coments, that more wiki pages will be touched up, that more account relationships will emerge rather than less.
Of course the experts in the internet identity space are trying to strike a balance. It’s clearly one of those high-risk high-benefit cases that people have trouble holding in their head.