Federation... Schmederation. Can't we all just get along?!?

The eWeek article below talks about Microsoft and the Liberty Alliance. I guess IBM recently decided to join the Liberty Alliance (along with already being a part of designing the ws-federation standards with Microsoft).  Interesting article.

https://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1681595,00.asp

This stuff is all very early in the development cycle, but I suspect it will all work itself out eventually.  From a customer point of view, one just wants to be able to federate with various other customers and business partners regardless of the solution.  In the end, many of the solutions that will support federation will support both ws-federation standards along with Liberty.  If the demand is high for this type of solution, it will work out great for the customer.  If not, I suspect it will be more difficult.