AOL is pretty much the only company that currently gets money in exchange for a network presence. While it may only put a 30 million-user feather in the cap of the Liberty Alliance, that's 30 million paying users -- the largest cache of transactional IDs currently on the Web. And that's what this race is about: The biggest number of transactional IDs. Now, the only question is: Who's next?
Rumor has it that the Liberty Alliance is just getting warmed up. Within days, two more significant companies are expected to announce their support for the Liberty initiative. This comes in addition to a rumor that Sun CEO Scott McNealy is going to make some announcement on Thursday at Oracle's OpenWorld regarding his national ID idea. McNealy may have had more figured out than he let on in my interview with him.
If these rumors come true, this week could permanently alter the course of our industry's history. So, while I rarely write huge speculative articles, this is a puzzle I simply couldn't resist trying to piece together. Bear with me on this one, and c'mon over to the water cooler. On the heels of AOL's announcement, what two companies should fall in line next, and what does any of this have to do with a national ID system? Please use ZDNet's TalkBack feature below to share your theories with us and your fellow readers.
The first question: Who?
According to Sun's Schwartz, the alliance will do little more than arrive at a specification. After that, execution is up to the members and anyone else who sees value in the Liberty authentication spec. In this case, as with many others in business, the old cliché rules: Execution is everything. With AOL joining, execution will rely heavily on successful deployment in the Windows environment. In order for that to happen, someone will need to make it easy to deploy Liberty on Windows, and not necessarily through the Java Virtual Machine. That someone is probably the provider of a Windows development tool in which a widget for Liberty-enablement can be included.
Three companies come to mind. The first is Borland. Borland has a track record of making great development tools for Windows that support widely accepted standards. For example, Borland has long been the go-to company for developers building CORBA-compliant Windows software.
Next, Oracle. While the company is not widely known as a Windows development tool company, it does make software for the Windows platform and CEO Larry Ellison is widely regarded as Scott McNealy's partner in the war on Microsoft. Strangely, Oracle is not listed as one of the founding members of Project Liberty. However, it's hard to imagine all of these announcements and industry-altering developments during the week of Oracle's own lovefest without Oracle itself joining the party. But hey, stranger things have happened.
Third, and my bet (call me crazy), is Microsoft. When times are tough, and they are, the last thing any industry needs is a bloodbath like Passport vs. Liberty. It's the sort of battle that puts everybody's budget on hold. In the context of that, AOL's enlistment has to be the straw that breaks the camel's back. Microsoft has two choices: Throw in the towel (the "if you can't beat them join them" approach), or be the odd-man out. If Microsoft waves Liberty off now, it will for the most part have to go the distance alone. Sure, there will be a uBid here and some other company there. But in the big picture, these aren't the VodaFones, Banks of America, and NTT DoCoMos that Liberty has brought on board. I don't care how deep Microsoft's pockets are: No amount of money is going to overcome the collective power of Liberty's founding members.
If Microsoft takes a seat at the table, the Passport authentication service will become Liberty compliant, and currently-in-beta upgrade to the Visual Studio development software -- VS.NET -- will include some sort of Liberty widget that makes it easy to develop Liberty-compliant Windows software.
Of course, I considered a slew of other companies for the tool/software list -- Symantec, McAfee, and Computer Associates. But I'm sticking with Microsoft.
If you believe the rumors, that still leaves room for one more company. My bet here is a company to whom authentication has always been a big deal. Three companies -- all competitors with each other -- stick out for not being in the alliance: Visa, MasterCard, and American Express.
All three are already on a path to converting members into holders of smart cards -- credit cards with a small computer (invariably based on the JavaCard spec) and some memory. It only seems natural that they'd be on board with some widely supported authentication initiative like Liberty or Passport. But if any of them were on the fence, the AOL announcement most certainly should have pushed them into the Liberty camp.
With 50 percent of the credit cards out there, Visa is the biggest player. But the company is deeply engaged in some of its own security and authentication initiatives, including something called SET 3D and something else called Verified-by-Visa (VbyV). Also, with that much marketshare, the company can afford waiting to see which of the two authentication schemes will prevail. American Express and MasterCard, on the other hand, have more to gain by joining Liberty. Both see Visa getting some credit for the work it's doing. Both need something big to counterbalance that. Something like Liberty. Here, my bet is on American Express.
[Editor's note: David wins the bet. AmEx heeds call of Liberty]
American Express is making a pretty good stink with its Blue smart card. Whereas Visa is relying on merchants like Target to distribute free smart card readers so customers can shop on-line securely, American Express is handing out free smart card readers itself. This may have more to do with the fact that Visa doesn't issue its own cards and Amex does. Even so, because Blue is a revolving credit card, it is what Amex will compete with against Visa and MasterCard, both of which are also based on revolving credit lines. If Amex is in a race to score as many on-line transactional IDs -- and it is -- then Liberty just became a pretty sure bet.
Donating technology
Finally, what does any of this have to do with a national ID system and what will Sun's McNealy have to say on Thursday? Connecting these dots is a bit more difficult, but here I go. First, the other cheerleader for bulletproof IDs, Oracle's Ellison, has already offered to donate Oracle technologies to the federal government for the purposes of establishing a more effective identification standard. Many speculate that it's nothing more than a marketing ploy. But, national security is one of those things that McNealy is passionate about. It keeps him up at night. Heck, if you knew the technology to solve the problem existed but wasn't being used, it would probably keep you up at night, too.
So, what could a guy who obsesses about national security, is worth $622 million, and runs a leading technology company with 6 billion dollars in the bank have to say about national security at OpenWorld? How about matching Ellison's offer with the systems and expertise the government would need to run the donated Oracle databases and fast-track the project? Sure, it would be a great publicity stunt. But maybe, just maybe, there's more to it than that. Maybe, in the same way that the music industry rallies to produce the financial aid that the September 11 victims' families so desperately needed, it's time for our industry to step up to the plate to help secure our homeland.
And what of Liberty? Well, the national ID system just becomes a Liberty poster child. After all, as Sun's Schwartz said in an interview with ZDNet and CNET yesterday, "The foundation of Liberty is basically a corporate directory. Products will look a lot like the directories used to run these things today, LDAP directories running on Oracle databases using things like RSA Secure." Sounds to me a lot like the makings of a national ID standard. If the only "national ID" I need for performing a three-factor authentication when I get on my next flight to New York is a Liberty-compliant Blue card that also serves as my credit card and my driver's license, count me in.
This is what water coolers are for. Aren't they?
