Identity is the operating system

I’ve got a phone number: +1 (312) 488-9373. Feel free to call or text it.

If I’m walking around, you’ll get me on my Samsung Galaxy S II. If I’m in transit (but not driving), you’ll probably get me on my iPad. If I’m at my desk, I’ll answer and take the whole call through my laptop. For you, the experience of contacting me will be exactly the same (give or take some background noise). For me, the experience fits my context: I can make and receive calls and texts on any of my devices. The same is true for email.

Consumption works the same way. All my important files are stored on Dropbox. If I need to get at something – for example, a work-in-progress piece of writing, or a receipt – I can pick up any of my Internet-connected devices and grab the contents. Similarly, my notes, which I take through Evernote: I can create and consume these anywhere.

A final example: I love movies. Watching them at the theater is still magical for me, but I also enjoy them elsewhere, depending on what kind of movie it is. (My favorite streamable new release right now is Midnight in Paris. A great film.)

At home, I use my dedicated media PC to play through a sound system and flat-screen monitor. It’s not perfect, but it works. Elsewhere, I might use my laptop or my iPad. On the road, I can play the same movie through the same service on my phone, or I may be able to take a downloaded version for offline consumption.

So far, so obvious. These are all known use cases that demonstrate why the consumer Internet is so powerful. But I have a question:

Shouldn’t applications, services and content be sold to me, instead of my devices?

Right now, I have to set each of my services up on each of my devices, and tell them to use the same account. That sometimes doesn’t work perfectly: for some reason, for example, I seem to have two Path accounts – one for my US handset, and one for my UK handset. I’m not sure how this happened.

Ideally, I want to sign up:

1. Once for each device, to tell them that I own it, and where I store my identity.
2. Once more for each service or application, to associate them with my identity.
3. The filesystem would be networked and bound to the identity. So rather than storing it on its own infrastructure, Evernote would save notes to my filesystem, which could potentially be accessed by other networked software.
4. Each identity would have an Internet-accessible unique identifier and point of entry.

The applications would then automagically become available on each of my devices. Crucially, when I go to buy or rent Midnight in Paris, it then is also available on all of my devices, because I’m renting via my identity rather than any one device. For the next 24 hours, say, I can stream the movie wherever is most convenient. If I buy a license for Microsoft Office, then it is licensed to my identity and I can use it on any of my devices.

This is literally a per-seat model for selling software. It makes buying and consuming simple, and will reduce piracy.

So here’s a follow-on question. It’s a dull-sounding one, but bear with me:

Wouldn’t this make enterprise provisioning dramatically easier?

Right now, system administrators in enterprise environments push software over their networks, and often refuse to allow non-approved hardware onto their infrastructure in order to make this easier. In an identity-centric model, though, where applications are delivered using Internet technologies:

1. Software would be provisioned to identities rather than machines.
2. The available identity domains and software on any given network could be locked down as appropriate (so, for example, I could bring in my smartphone but only use a sanctioned identity with it if I wanted to connect to the local network).

Wouldn’t this make consumer applications dramatically less annoying?

For me, the answer is “yes”. I don’t want to care about my devices and their capabilities, and I’m a CTO with a computer science degree. End users want their software to seamlessly “just work”, and they want to seamlessly be able to move content from one machine to another, or share to another person no matter what that thing happens to be, or where their data is stored. Right now, operating systems have become gatekeepers: bottlenecks that get in the way of users.

For me, this is the real application of a decentralized social web. It’s not just about sending messages around – it’s about using the Internet to create a fabric of interdependent applications where we retain control of our data (those identities and networked filesystems could be anywhere) while enjoying a simpler experience. Application providers and content owners sell more of their products, because they’re easier to consume, everyone loves their devices that little bit more, and every new product sold becomes a window onto a much bigger, connected ecosystem that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Photo by Troy Holden, released under a Creative Commons license.