I was reading the blog post entitled The hard side of Mister Softie from Josh Quittner of Fortune magazine which ends with the following excerpt

Hall said that Microsoft’s main concern, and the reason it sent out Big Foot letters in the first place, was security. “If you look at what a number of sites are doing, they’re asking for your Hotmail login info, They’re storing your identity, which is not a best practices [approach] for anyone’s data from a security standpoint. We want to make sure our data is kept between our users and our servers.”

The thrust of the term sheets, he said, was to create a process whereby Hotmail and other Windows Live data could be shared securely with third parties. Added Hall: “There are models for federation where you can trust other services—and that’s what we’re trying to do with our partners.”

Thats what doesn’t make sense to me. If this is such a security problem, why do Google and Yahoo let their users take their contacts with them?

Besides the obvious observation that folks at Google & Yahoo! probably don’t think it’s a good idea for random fly-by-night social networking services to be collecting  usernames and password from users of their services (see posts like Spock sign-up flow demonstrates how to scare users away... from Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo!), I am amused by the “if the geniuses at Google and Yahoo! think it’s OK, who are the Microsoft morons to think different” sentiment exposed by that statement.

Maybe I’m getting snarky in my old age.

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