James Hightower writes:

Which brings me to the question; "What ARE people using, and what are they GOING to use?" Can anyone point me to a survey of the most used

Consumer will be using so that we can be there with strong, usable ^^^^^^^^ Who?

crypto when he gets there. ^^^^^ Where?

Or less tersely, which users of messaging are you interested in providing crypto for? Apart from the Defence sector, there seem to be three main communities: 1 "Formal" inter-business electronic messaging using commercial value-added networks (VANs) - which are perceived as secure - and associated user agent software (which varies greatly). About fifty thousand North American companies are "there" already (for EDI, and at a cost). Leakage (due to high VAN costs) of formal messaging business from VANs onto the insecure Internet is not yet significant - although CommerceNet will doubtless fix that. 2 Intra-organisation nessaging based on LAN or corporate workflow and email systems. This has built both bottom-up and downwards (e.g. from PROFS or equivalent). The prevalent software is diverse, proprietary and volume. I don't have total market figures to hand, but as an example, the 11JUL94 Government Computer News ranks MS Mail (Windows 3), cc:Mail (Windows), cc:Mail(DOS), MS Mail (PC Networks), and WordPerfect Office as the most preferred e-mail packages amongst Federal users. I would expect a similar list in most commercial email-enabled organisations (with the addition of Lotus Notes). Varying security facilities are bundled within these packages already. 3 The "informal messaging" sector (including most Internet traffic). The associated software is more diverse and "open", but its users have a marginal and/or occasional need for end-to-end / message-transfer security. Note: for both 1 and 2, an "insecure machine" (i.e.: with administrative intrusion potential into an individual's messaging security) is more likely a requirement than a problem for medium/large corporations - as management supervision and control over information assets need to be possible. -- Tim May writes:

I had assumed the poll was of *us*, which is both a manageable poll to take, and a useful one.

What would be done with the results? --- James A. Donald says:

High Tech industry has considerable experience with surveys of consumers for nonexistent products.

Such surveys are useless at best, and dangerous at worst.

On the other hand, how else do you find out whether a sufficiently serious market exists to warrant investment in developing / productising a technology ? - pvm