Turns out Kim was busy getting himself to safety from hurricane Wilma, which most certainly is a much more important activity than responding to mailing list or blog comments. Now that he is back, he’s very clear on his views about “Who owns the [identity] metasystem”:

So let me provide some definitive and public answers that represent my thinking as Microsoft’s Architect of Identity … and which Mike Jones, Andy Harjanto, John Shewchuk, and all the rest of us from identity land at Microsoft see as self-evident:

No one can own the identity metasystem – that would be a silly goal by any standards.

…As for the passage Johannes quotes, it is not our intended message. We’ve talked about Microsoft’s Vision for an Identity Metasystem, but never implied we “owned” the system.

Apparently my “over-zealous copywriter” theory was correct, and the problem has been corrected for the conference in question. But this also illuminates the uphill battle for “us from identity land at Microsoft”: everybody, the copywriters just as me and so many others who have commented to me privately, is just very wary of, and immediately willing to believe in gaps between public statements of the good people at Microsoft, like Kim, and actual actions of the corporate entity on the ground. You gotta admire Kim and his fellow change agents at Microsoft, because it’s most certainly about the hardest place in this industry from where to launch an open, participatory system of any kind …