[OpenID] A lesson from history for Facebook

[SitG Admin]

>By the late 80's Apple was inching closer to bankruptcy, while William Gates
>was laughing all the way to the bank!

So they spent how many years as the underdog, and how many years 
making a triumphant comeback? (The simplest lessons, especially when 
drawn from the simplest stories, are rarely the *only* lessons to be 
found in history.)

>Of cource the circumstances for Facebook are different today. But the
>underlying strategic mistake made by Apple cannot be missed.

Also note that the Motorola chipsets could be found in non-Apple 
hardware, from companies such as PowerComputing that sold "clones" 
which worked with the Mac OS; that the Macintosh was NOT higher than 
an equivalent PC, after factoring in all the external hardware and 
extra software that would be needed to equip a PC with everything 
that a Mac came with built-in; and that the openness of the OS was a 
much bigger deal for Microsoft when it came to 3rd-party programmers 
making games for their platform.

>I hope Facebook
>learns from the past, and chooses to support OpenID as an OP, before it is
>too late.

What level of "support" were you looking for? It was possible to use 
your Facebook account as an OpenID (v2.0-compatible) nearly two years 
ago (back in early August of '07), using their API to develop the 
appropriate functionality. (Or, if you didn't want to, you could use 
the secondary "OP" of the innovator who first made it possible, as a 
"bridge" from Facebook to the rest of the 'net.)

-Shade