Here is a summary of what Bill Gates said about OpenID and CardSpace at his RSA conference keynote. (Thanks to Mike Jones, who took these notes and let me publish them):

• Slide: Evolution of Identity: Making the Vision Real (with picture of two cards in hands)
• People are used to choosing what credential to use where for what purpose (talking about cards in our wallets)
• We use a variety of physical tokens to represent these things
• CardSpace creates a vehicle to allow people to have a GUI for credentials that represent their identities or personas in particular situations
• Each thing in the physical world conveys a particular set of information and discloses just enough information
• CardSpace provides a drag & drop interface for identity
• People will have to acclimate to it
• People can create their own credentials and others can give you credentials
• The system reasons about what the right credential is for you to simplify things for users
• WS-* hints about what credentials that are being looked for
• CardSpace shows candidates for credentials

Then they segued to the OpenID collaboration announcement:

• Issues of reputation and trust are foundational on the Internet
• Different levels of trust are needed in different contexts, such as blogs and access to enterprise resources
• People have been thinking about issues of trust
• OpenID 2.0 is doing this in the blog / Web 2.0 world, others are coming at this from the enterprise space
• We see these approaches as being complementary
• “Today we are announcing that we are supporting OpenID 2.0 and that they’re extending what they’ve done to enable the use of strong credentials”
• They’re doing this because they see that it solves problems and attacks that a pure password approach has
• We’re excited about this marriage of CardSpace and Web 2.0
• This will help eliminate the possibility of man-in-the-middle attacks
• CardSpace is built on our work on the WS-* specifications
• OpenID will be endorsing the CardSpace marriage later today
• We see this as a very smooth continuum with a common GUI metaphor

Wow, how far a little identity URL can go!