At Gartner's Symposium last fall, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told an audience of technology executives that "Liberty has zero chance of mattering."
He then chided Sun for failing to enlist America Online, Sun's former partner in the iPlanet joint venture, into Liberty. Since then, America Online has tossed its hat into the Liberty ring-along with American Express, MasterCard, Visa, France Telecomm, General Motors, Hewlett-Packard, EarthLink, EDS, Nextel, and PricewaterhouseCoopers. United Airlines CIO Eric Dean is the chairman of the Liberty Alliance's Management Board; other Liberty Alliance participants include Bank of America, Deloitte & Touche, Fidelity, Cisco, Intuit, and Novell.
Microsoft's Passport, Liberty's leading competitor, boasts an impressive roster of supporters too and has a significant technological head start. Aside from having the support of Microsoft's commerce-driven Web destinations such as Expedia and MoneyCentral, online commerce leader eBay is in the Passport camp as well. This is in addition to a bunch of other familiar brands such as McAfee, Starbucks, Costco, Godiva (yummy), Hilton, Office Depot, Radio Shack, and Victoria's secret.
In fact, if you compare the two lists of official supporters, you'll find that the Passport slate of supporters dwarfs Liberty's roster. Although Passport can claim the upper hand by dint of shear numbers, a raw tally can be deceiving. When AOL, with its thirty-something million paid subscribers joined Liberty, the Alliance's chief coalition builder, Sun's Jonathan Schwartz, called it the coupe de grace. Perhaps Schwartz spoke too soon. With Visa joining Liberty's ranks along side MasterCard and American Express, it appears as though Liberty has scored the ultimate hat trick, and has foreclosed participation in Passport on behalf of any major credit card player.
I would have loved to been on fly on the wall in any Symposium attendee's office after they had a chance to digest Ballmer's hasty dismissal of the relationship between Sun and AOL. But, the bottom line right now is that Liberty appears to be on a roll, enlisting the support of one giant after another. Suffice to say that Ballmer's assessment of Liberty's significance, or lack thereof, appears to have been thoroughly debunked. Passport certainly matters. But so too does Liberty.
