Microsoft: the 21st-century post office?

In a post yesterday, I noted that Bill G had made a statement in Davos to the effect that spam would be eradicated by a post-office like mechanism. Naturally, I thought the world's most forward-looking rich guy was thinking of the actual post offices as the mechanism for doing so.

Maybe he was. However, with a tip from Dean, I found out that Microsoft has been working on solving this issue for some time in a project called Penny Black. In short, Penny Black (name taken from the first British postal stamp) is research into how to make spam infeasible through mostly technological means that include an economic cost to the issuer rather than on the recipient of the emailings. Good idea. It is, however, quite possible based on what they're doing that MS thinks it can be the post office of the 21st (electronic)-century.

Of course there's that whole independent, disinterested, regulated, socially-benefitting aspect of the post office in the communications paradigm that Microsoft doesn't actually fit . . . Keep at it Bill

Posted by Grayson at January 27, 2004 08:13 AM