At 1:06 PM -0700 4/15/98, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
Now, even though Apple had the help of RSA and BBN, there was this even bigger problem of just helping people get it. The best way to help people understand technology is to make it accessible so almost anyone can play with it and use it. This is what Apple is known for - making technology so accessible that people just go nuts, doing things with it and taking it places no one ever dreamed. That's how Apple catalyzed the transformation of the publishing industry. Requiring a CA to make DigiSign work simply made this impossible. A peer to peer model, allowing people to create and sign their own certificates would have been far more appropriate for Apple's creative users. Then came PGP...
I think Mark makes a mistake in confusing pre-conditions for market acceptance with requirements for market growth.
From the perspective of someone who helped the Web grow from a userbase of less than 100 users I have my own ideas as to why Apple did not succeed with its powertalk architecture. I see the lack of commitment to open standards as the key factor. ... But just because CAs may be dispensed with in a system of 10,000 odd users whose principal concern is confidentiality does not mean they have no role in a system of over 1 million users where the legal enforceability of a signed contrat is an issue. ... The other shortcomming of Apple's approach was not realising that there is a middle ground. To take an example most people...
Lack of commitment to open standards was made obvious by the fact that Apple considered the POP/SMTP plug-in for PowerTalk to be a 3rd party opportunity! However, I was only really talking about the DigiSign stuff, trying not to get sucked into the whole enchalada of discussing why PowerTalk failed. I have no bone to pick with the CA model. Apple was stuck at the high end of this model when, as Phill points out, many levels of authentication are needed. I simply think that starting with a personal model, more like PGP, would have allowed DigiSign to build some momentum, at least in the Mac market (not a bad place to start). So, it was in fact a pre-condition for market acceptance. Market growth could have been accelerated by just paying attention. As with many Apple technologies, there was never a version 2.0 and 3.0 and so on, to correct for the misconceptions about the market. A lot of people knew what needed to be done, but management usually remained clueless. Mark