> People have a reason to use their accounts on Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail/Live, Facebook, Twitter, and etc. […] As long as OpenID remains just an identity provider, it will continue to lose ground.

I'm not sure I understand what you're saying here. TTBOMK, Google, Yahoo!, and Windows Live ID are all also OpenID providers. E.g., the Isotropic online Dominion server allows users to “log in with a Google or Yahoo! account” with an OpenID backend.

So if your thesis is that people reject OpenID because they can't extend their identities from those existing accounts, I don't see how that's the case, unless the OPs have restrictions I'm unaware of. (People might not know they can identify themselves with those accounts, which I think is a real problem, but a separate one.)