Where is this invisible market?? I don't consider newsgroups & mailing
lists a widespread market and IETF pgp signing sessions are hardly the
way I expect to see internet commerce to evolve. In my user
community (a company), I have a harder time selling PGP than I do with
PEM.
I agree.
This is, and always has been, the crux of the differences. If by the "market",
we mean those users who get something for free, in many cases ignoring the
niceties of patents and licenses, and use it for generally trivial social
discourse as opposed to business, then perhaps the market has spoken.
But if you consider the "market" to involve vendors like Lotus and Microsoft,
and the users to be corporate accounts at IBM and AT&T and General Motors and
the US Government, then that market has barely begun to frame the question
properly, much less provide the answer.
And despite a lot of hype about all the great things that CommerceNet and the
secure Web are going to provide, I strongly suspect that a much wider audience
is about to gain a painful education in reality. The problems we are facing are
HARD, and insisting that they be solved for free and without consideration for
the larger picture doesn't make them get any easier. IMHO, of course.
Bob
Robert R. Jueneman
GTE Laboratories
40 Sylvan Road
Waltham, MA 02254
617/466-2820
Jueneman(_at_)GTE(_dot_)COM