[tptacek]

I don't think engineers automatically agree with you that organizations should pay less money for the services they're working on, is the issue here. It feels like a lot of people on this thread are convinced that Very Annoying Things are, per se, moral catastrophes. But they aren't. Services cost what they cost.

A literally equivalent way to look at the SSO tax is "the no SSO rebate". As a security engineer, I'm not prepared to launch a moral crusade over SMBs who don't adopt SSO on all their random SAAS apps; meanwhile, we're SSO on everything, and it costs us extra money, and that's life in the National Foosball League.

[CoffeeOnWrite]

I’m the commenter that’s not on a moral crusade, or even annoyed, I just question the business justification for gating SSO in this day and age :)

[tptacek]

See above: companies with SSO's are overwhelmingly less price-sensitive than companies without them, which tend to be smaller.

[CoffeeOnWrite]

Times are changing though. Smaller companies increasingly have SSO portals. At what tipping point will the industry embrace SSO for everyone?

[tptacek]

Since the whole point of the SSO tax is to segment out small companies from larger ones, mass adoption of single signon by small companies is a problem that will solve itself, as SSO stops being a good segmentation signal.

[CoffeeOnWrite]

Are we talking past each other? It seems like we just disagree on when segmentation on SSO will no longer be prudent - I believe we’ve crossed that point, and you believe it’s in the future. Seems like we agree in substance though.

[JshWright]

I don't think Thomas has an opinion on the "when". He's just saying it's being used that way. If it's being used that way, then it's still a good signal (in the markets where it is being used in that manner).

If it's actually true that we have crossed the point where it is no longer prudent for companies to segment their customers this way, then there are a whole lot of companies making unsound business decisions, and the problem will solve itself.