Now not to do identity management (read this nintendo) [from 2019]

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Identity management is hard

Just so everyone understands, I get this...having worked with connected devices and multiple phones/consoles/cars/headsets/speakers all cross linked to other devices and other accounts...I get it's HARD to maintain and/or associate the correct PERSON with the correct DEVICE with the correct ACCOUNT (note, those are all different things...I can have multiple bank accounts, accessible from multiple devices, and multiple people could share my account and/or device, but who can do what from what is difficult.

Add kids and games and shit to the mix

I'm not necessarily saying nintendo has done a poor job (no...scratch that...I'm saying they have)... what I'm really saying is that they have a particular demographic that makes identity and device management difficult...namely KIDS. Now, before all the single parents with one kid who had a nintendo DS once who claim this shit is super simple...and before the folks who can only afford for their kids to play in the street with rocks and dirt...I get it..this is a first world problem...but, I think it's leading indicator of a problem more and more people are gonna have.

Background

I started buying nintendo stuff for the kids...IDK...15-20 years ago? I have no idea...I'd have to ask my oldest daughter, but this evening I tried to just help one of my kids (I have a few, so I realize I'm an outlier, but perhaps this is something to consider if you're trying to manage user/device/vehicle accounts as a fleet manager...just sayin). all we needed to do was link the named user account associated with HIM on a WII-U to his brother's nintendo switch device (actually I don't even know who's device was whose...but you get the idea). So nintendo has this great concept of accounts on the device that may or may not correlate to similarly named accounts on other devices...In addition, each device may have those accounts linked to other "nintendo id's" which apparently have no direct correlation to an email address or other way of knowing who you are.

So here's what happens

So then, every christmas or two, we get a new nintendo device (or two) and try to link everything up....and spend hours upon hours trying to piece together our accounts like some sort of perverse Ikea furniture that also needs some integration between multiple competing javascript libraries. And ultimately, we create either a new burner email account or ... hell I don't even know ... half the time we get things "kinda working" and never figure out how to link everything together.

In the world of selling stuff this isn't bad

In reality, if nintendo is intent on selling hunks of silicon and plastic, this is a non-issue...hell folks are gonna throw that old console away in a year anyway so who cares? In the future, I believe consumers are going to expect a continuity of service...ESPECIALLY within the same brand. Why? Because every one of my kids is completely confounded by this! Like, they seem to look at me like I'm trying to deliberately sabotage their friends lists and accomplishments for some weird reason.

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