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He left the company in 2002 after leading it to acquisition by Sophos for $US 23m. Hardt is most recently known for his work on solving identity problems – questions like how do you prove to a web site who you are? How can you gain access to sites but retain anonymity?
He is particularly famous for a stunning presentation he delivered as the keynote speech at O’Reilly’s Open Source Conference (OSCON) 2005. This presentation is informative on the topic of identity, but it is also highly regarded for the sheer unique method of delivery with a fast-paced sequence of slides that visually convey the message while he spoke.
From here, Hardt kicked off Sxip, producing Sxipper, a free browser extension that fills in forms based on a database of web sites and their structure (rather than relying on matching underlying field names as employed by many comparable products.)
This week Hardt posted a blog entry “Dick Hardt joins Microsoft” joking that while he may be joining the Borg he hasn’t sold out.
Hardt describes his role as having the title Partner Architect and being engaged in consumer, enterprise and government identity problems. He notes he will continue to use a Macintosh computer until such time as Microsoft make him more efficient by using Windows. Hardt slyly implies Vista isn’t up for the job, commenting that the Windows 7 team should take the hint while they are still developing their product.
Hardt says he will be moving to Redmond but Sxipper will continue to be a totally independent product and is not being acquired by Microsoft.
On the one hand, Hardt is clearly not adverse to harmonious relationships with Microsoft. I had the pleasure of meeting him personally at a .NET beta workshop held in Seattle in November 2000 where Hardt briefly presented how ActiveState were early adopters of the technology, with a .NET version of ActivePython in the works. His strong regional accent was particularly memorable to me and I was pleasantly surprised when seeking guidance on excellence in presentation to find his above-mentioned keynote.
His conversion of Perl to Windows especially attracted attention at the time, with certain open source advocates dismayed to see “their” products running on Microsoft operating systems.
Yet, on the other hand, Hardt is an open source entrepreneur and while clearly observing what Microsoft are up to, has gone his own way using alternate platforms and languages.
It will be interesting to see what his work at Microsoft produces and if this leads to the holy grail of single sign-on for the Internet as a whole. And it will also be interesting to see if Hardt is still coding for Firefox on a Mac in months to come.
