{"id":411,"date":"2009-09-28T14:01:19","date_gmt":"2009-09-28T22:01:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/netmesh.info\/jernst\/?p=319"},"modified":"2009-09-28T14:01:19","modified_gmt":"2009-09-28T22:01:19","slug":"the-lack-of-user-demand-for-internet-identity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/2009\/09\/the-lack-of-user-demand-for-internet-identity\/","title":{"rendered":"The “Lack Of User Demand” for Internet Identity"},"content":{"rendered":"

Alexander van Elsas<\/a> left a comment<\/a> on my post “On Identity Business Models or Lack Thereof<\/a>” that I feel I have to respond to. It is not the first time I have heard a comment along these lines, so this is more a response to “everybody”, not specifically just to him. He writes:<\/p>\n

…The underlying issue (imo) is that there isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t a user demand. Users either don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know or care, and it is therefore hard to get them to use a standalone hosted identity provider and pay for it.<\/p>\n

…The technology is not the biggest bottleneck right now, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the naiveness of the user.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Pardon me, but this very much sounds like the old “our software is great, if it wasn’t for those darned users”. To which the equally old, and always-correct answer is: “No, the user is never the problem. As vendors, we either solve a problem for our users, in which case they pay us, or we don’t. If users don’t use our ‘solution’, we either don’t solve an actual problem, or we don’t explain well enough how we solve the problem, or our solution is simply not good enough for the user.”<\/p>\n

At this point, it is very clear that consumer identity providers do not solve a problem for users that is commensurate with paying money. (I would go further and say that the product category “consumer identity provider” is most likely never<\/em> going to be able to get many users paying for it.)<\/p>\n

To quote Pip Coburn<\/a>: “People are only willing to change when the pain of their current situation outweighs the perceived pain of trying something new.” We are not there yet in identity land, even if we’d all like to be there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Alexander van Elsas left a comment on my post “On Identity Business Models or Lack Thereof” that I feel I have to respond to. It is not the first time I have heard a comment along these lines, so this is more a response to “everybody”, not specifically just to him. He writes: …The underlying…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"webmentions_disabled":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[59,60],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-411","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comments","category-digital_identity","kind-"],"kind":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=411"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=411"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=411"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=411"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}