Five years after helping to launch Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing initiative, Bill Gates put some grace notes on how far and wide the extensive effort helped improve the company’s product lines. “It was just last week that we released Vista and that’s a big milestone for us in terms of security because we had a chance to apply our development process, our secure design lifecycle process to that product,” he said during the RSA Security Conference here. Gates, who is transitioning out of day-to-day management of the company by 2008, called security the fundamental challenge that will determine whether the industry can successfully create a new generation of connected experiences. “The answer for the industry lies in our ability to design systems and processes that give people and organizations a high degree of confidence that the technology they use will protect their identity, their privacy and their information,” he said. In an update that reflected a thaw in Microsoft’s approach to some open source projects, Gates said the company’s Windows CardSpace identity management metasystem will work with OpenID 2.0, an open source user-driven digital identity framework.