"Am I the only one who is terrified about Microsoft Passport? It seems to me like a fairly blatant attempt to build the world's largest, richest consumer database, and then make fabulous profits mining it. It's a terrifying threat to everyone's personal privacy and it will make today's "cookies" seem positively tame by comparison. The scariest thing is that Microsoft is advertising Passport as if it were a benefit to consumers, and people seem to be falling for it! By the time you've read this article, I can guarantee that I'll scare you into turning off your Hotmail account and staying away from MSN web sites."

"It's not just you...many of us at MS don't even begin to understand what .NET is (and I even work on Passport, the shining example of a "web service"). Management spent nearly a year explaining how everyone needed to focus on NGWS and how we could all fit into the vision - without ever describing the goal. It was the proverbial answer in search of a question. All of a sudden it has a new name, seemingly an attempt to hide the fact that it still has no body. And to make things worse, they throw in a brand-new programming language which is really nothing more but a copy of java which is unfinished, hasn't been tested for five years, and lacks a large standard library.

I've asked around how this new .NET plan differs from everything we've been working on the past two years and haven't been given a decent answer."