Did we see the same keynote speech?

Maybe I'm just growing extremely cynical, but I'm not sure that Douglas Schweitzer and I are talking about  the same keynote speech at RSA.  Whereas Douglas found Mr. Gates' speech exciting and reassuring, I found it to be more of the same.  The four concepts of security that Bill Gates spoke of are all very real and necessary, but it's going to be years before they have any impact on the average consumer.  Businesses will start feeling the impact in the next several years as Vista comes out, but the average consumer isn't going to see anything concrete for quite some time.

Not that I wasn't encouraged by what Mr. Gates had to say, that is, build security into the products from the start, but I just don't see it having much of an impact in the near future.  The changes to infrastructure required to take advantage of the identity solutions Microsoft envisions are going to be major and won't be easy to implement.  The ease of use features they demonstrated looked great, but until the vendors can make the same changes to their infrastructure, none of them will be available. 

What concerns me the most about Micrsoft's proposed security upgrades is the fact that to take advantage of the majority of them, the end user, the corporate systems and the web sites they use are all going to have to be on the Microsoft platform.  I see this as just another way to lock as many people as possible into Microsoft by making it too difficult to go anywhere else.

The idea of federated systems and an identity on a smartcard that allows you to easily log on to any site you want to visit is great.  The idea of a safer online experience is even better.  The idea of putting all my eggs in Microsoft's basket, not so great.