In the late nineties, the smart card world worked out that each smart card was so expensive, it would only work if the issuer could do multiple apps on each card. That is, if they could share the cost with different uses (or users).
This resulted in a big shift to multi-application cards, and a lot of expensive reworking and a lot of hype. All the smart card people were rushing to present their own architecture; all the user banks were rushing to port their apps back into these environments, and scratching their heads to come up with App #2 (access control, loyalty...)
.....
I've maintained since the mid-90s ... that the idea of multi-app smartcard is from sometimes in the '80s. the tarket was the portable computing environment .... before there was portable input & output technology. One of the reasons for smartcard standards was to have interoperability between input/output support stations .... and the portable computing.
The mid-90s saw some take-off in capability of multi-app smartcards because the technology that could be packaged into a smartcard got greater.
Also by the mid-90s, there was portable input & output technology and PDAs and cellphones were starting to rapidly fill the target market niche for multi-app smartcards (where everybody had their own portable computing input/output capability w/o having to find a station someplace).
One of the other target market niches for the portable computing devices was the offline environment (again left=over from the 80s) .... however, with the pervasive penetration of the Internet into the world market .... followed by all sorts of wireless capability .... any target offline market niche is rapidly going the way of the dinosaurs. One might claim that continuing momentum for multi-app smartcards is the enormous investment that was made starting by at least the late '80s continuing up through the current time.
So while there was an escalating amount of capability that could be packaged in a smartcard form-factor by the late 90s along with an escalating cost .... apparently requiring escalating feature/function to try and justify the escalating costs .... why would somebody want significant amount of capability in what is effectively a deaf & dumb device (w/o its support stations) .... when you could get enormously better usability by packaging the significant amount of capability in PDA/cellphone form factor.
i tried to take the opposite track with the aads chip strawman .... find a reasonably compelling business case for a hardware token .... and then totally focus on that function.
the compelling business use selected was authentication. aads attempts to totally focus on KISS authentication as a compelling business reason for a hardware token .... with aggressive discarding everything that doesn't support the authentication compelling business use (if something non-KISS authentication is needed .... get a PDA or cellphone).
misc. aads stuff: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/index.html#aads
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Anne & Lynn Wheeler http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm
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