Thrilling.
So I sat through John Thompson's keynote yesterday, listening to his vision of the future and how we must restore *confidence* - I said *confidence* in the online experience. You can view the RSA keynotes here: http://www.rsaconference.com/2007/us/content/webcasts/

Over-billing.
John worked his way through the library of products that his company has acquired and the working groups that they've participated in, saying little more than how *confident* he was that Norton 2007 had finally solved world hunger and global warming. More inflation of the Anti-virus value proposition from a company that is simultaneously pitching a collection of solutions to manage risk.

Shilling.
He also talked a great deal about protecting identities as the number one issue facing the security industry today. Given my background in Identity Management (and it's various alternative names) over the last 10 years, I was less than excited to see Symantec jump on the IAM bandwagon. He seemed to have a lot of *confidence* that his company had the tools to address "the identity issue". I have a lot of *confidence* that cobbling together a number of solutions across a number of problem sets does not make you a Subject Matter Expert. I have just as much *confidence* that Symantec does not know enough about the identity space to be taken seriously ... at least not yet.

Chilling.
The ironic part was when John went after Microsoft at the end of his keynote. He resurrected an old analogy that the person who maintains your bookkeeping should not be entrusted with auditing your books. In turn, he asserted that the company that makes and maintains your Operating System should not be entrusted with the protection of that Operating System. Sorry John, but that message doesn't fly ... despite the anti-Microsoft applause that it drew during the presentation. Those who buy first and think about integration into the glass house later should be careful where they aim their stones.

Don't get me wrong - I've had my share of beefs with Microsoft over the years and John is an eloquent speaker with some very good things to say during his keynote - but this kind of appeal to "conflict of interest" is overblown and beside the point. My advice to John is to sell his mousetrap on its merits if he believes that it is better. If you don't want the world to buy a competitor's products, explain to the world why your solutions are better. Period.

That's been our message from day one and our customers know why they put their trust in IP360. I am *confident* that their trust has nothing to do with the fact that we're not an OS vendor.