The company also says it will soon make public the details behind its flavour of Kerberos.

ECONOMIST: Microsoft

However, the Kerberos story fits nicely with the future that Bill Gates described when he resigned in mid-January as Microsoft's chief executive to become its chief software architect.

ECONOMIST: Microsoft

It asserts that it has only made use of a feature in a new version of the Kerberos standard that is currently being drafted, and is not trying to undercut the existing standard.

ECONOMIST: Microsoft

Kerberos gained pre-eminence because it is clever, and because its developers, computer scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, released the source code, which let security experts around the world debug and refine the program line by line.

ECONOMIST: Microsoft