Microsoft to stop promoting Passport

When one of the world’s biggest e-commerce portal eBay stops using a particular technology… you know something is seriously wrong with it. eBay was one of the first big companies to have welcomed and adopt the Microsoft’ Passport service for the users to access their website. However, the same company now is proving to be one of the biggest advocator on how the technology has failed the market with little development and more headaches.

Monster.com, an online job site had already discarded Passport validation on their website sometime back, which was just an indication on what was coming up in the future. Now, Microsoft has done something, which verifies what everyone had anticipated. They are taking a step back on their efforts to promote Passport as an identification system on the web.

They are stopping their efforts to promote it to new prospective customers. Passport let customers store their personal information as well as passwords and credit card numbers so that they do not have to remember them while shopping online on stores supporting Passport. However, security issues on certain occasions led to fears that the information stored might not be as secure as Microsoft initially claimed.

Other than that, many e-shopping sites feared that Microsoft’s monopoly might result in paid for subscription in the future. This lead to smaller players staying away from it. In fact, the service has solid competition from other major players like Sony, Hewlett-Packard, and Sun Microsystems with their Liberty Alliance services.

Microsoft on their part claims that they are withdrawing publicity of this service to promote other offerings, which would let web stores to offer their own identification systems.

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