Remember high-profile Grand Central Networks, which was one of the very few high-flying tech startups after the collapse of the dot-com bubble? (Not to be confused with what became Google Voice, they only reuse the domain name.)
Grand Central was founded by Halsey Minor, with the vision of electronically connecting companies and ASPs via standard protocols, so information could flow across companies along a supply chain, for example.
His envisioned architecture was modeled along the lines of a phone company: give everybody a simple plug to plug into, and do a lot of complicated routing and switching in a centralized manner as a service. Perhaps later connect to other phone companies.
That model failed, of course. Part of the reason may have been that the whole web services movement with all of its complexity and its associated high software prices took the vision sideways. He might simply have been too early in the market. And the phone company architecture may also have been the wrong one.
But I’m getting the impression that the identity community is attempting to do the same thing, whether we know it or not. Interestingly:
- we started with identifying users and proving to other entities who they are. (The URL as globally unique identifier, and single-sign-on, via LID and OpenID)
- then we added the movement of some related data (profile exchange, PAPE)
- the ability to authorize others to access information (OAuth)
- more complex related information (Portable Contacts)
- now we are getting into moving larger amounts of data (artifact binding)
It’s a very gradual and slow process, but if we keep going down that path, where will we end up? I think it includes right where Halsey Minor wanted to be. And there is a chance that this approach will work: consumer/open internet-driven adoption works better for this, “free” works better, a decentralized/federated/multi-party approach works better as it aggregates a lot more business cases, a pluggable systems approach works better and so forth.
If it turns out to work, it will be at least 10 years after his vision, more likely 15.
Stuff for thought. Being the first in the market is for suckers.
One response to “Is OpenID/Open Stack What Grand Central Tried to Do?”
Or perhaps trying to monetize a market by controlling the information flow within the market is for suckers?
I think all of us are headed down the path where more of the data on the web gets usable by processes, not just humans. Along the way I see a lot of people trying to get some skim by being an unnecessary intermediary between processes. If there’s a way around that insertion into the intermediary, the market will find it eventually.
Although I hope for PDF and Doc files that day comes sooner than I fear it will.