With the recent announcements of Yahoo to fully and Google to partially support OpenID and the now official engagement of IBM, Microsoft, Verisign, and other key players of the market in the OpenID Foundation it seems obvious that OpenID is now THE standard for user centric identity management.
I agree - partially. OpenID is A standard for user centric identity management which definitely will, with some advancements, will influence the way people act in the internet. But I'm, for example, convinced that it won't replace Microsoft's Infocards (as the technical basis). These two things are two different as well from the use cases as from their capabilities. There might be an OpenID 3.0 or something which in fact is sort of a combination of both. But there will be many things from the outside which influence today's OpenID.
That's, by the way, no surprise. Virtually any new standard started small and with limited capabilities and grew over time to a more complete, more sophisticated solution. While the original creator's of OpenID will focus on ease of use, the new supporters will focus more on "sophistication".
And the end there will be some OpenID which is much more secure and supports many more use cases than today's standard - but which is as well a little more complex. But I'm convinced that it will be a major pillar for user-centric identity management over the next years. Together with CardSpace and it's incarnations. By the way: We support Infocards at our website right now and OpenID and CardSpace will, for sure, be major topics at the European Identity Conference 2008, with speakers like Kim Cameron.