Way back in the early mists of time that marked the founding of Digital ID World (2002), Phil Becker and I ventured to Redmond for one of Microsoft's private journalist/analyst announcement events. This was in the days of Passport blowing up in Microsoft's face, the launch of the Rights Management Server (RMS), the rise of Active Directoy (AD), and the early days of the now defunct NGSCB (aka, "palladium" - hat tip to Peter Biddle).
We went to Microsoft on a mission: to tell anyone that would listen that the real business that all of these seemingly disparate technologies was in was the identity business. We urged countless senior folks to realize that AD and RMS shouldn't be living under different roofs, but should be seen as pieces of a much larger problem. Some listened, some didn't - but the organizational structure at Microsoft persisted, and housed most "identity technologies" (in our view) under different bosses.
Now, all of that has finally changed, as Microsoft has announced the formation of the new Identity and Security division - a division that merges the Access Security Division and the Identity and Access Division. It brings under one roof Identity Lifecycle Manager, Rights Management Services, Active Directory and Cardspace, and trust me - that's a good thing.
Kudos to Microsoft for getting it right. ;-)
[one side-note: Palladium morphed into BitLocker and moved away from some of its more "identity-based" components and toward a more strictly encryption-based model. While I still think that BitLocker is a foundational identity-enabling technology, I understand why it doesn't live in this new division.]
