Google and Microsoft – Addicted to Health
January 20, 2010
The market is big. Health care is exciting except for those with tons of dough. The White House wants to resuscitate an industry. Oh, did I mention that health care has lots of money sloshing around?
ComputerWorld’s “Microsoft’s Secret Weapon against Google: Health Search” surprised me. Microsoft is pushing into health via deals with big outfits. Google seems to be content to baby step along with what I called its “meh strategy”. You can read more about “meh” in my KMWorld column which I submitted a week ago. For out purposes in this uncompensated blog post, “meh” means “what the heck”. Google likes to dissemble via feigned indifference and doing a little of this and then a little of that. Microsoft is a different animal. The company props up a target and then goes right at that target. Google wanders; Microsoft charges. Same in health.
The article points out that a query for “high blood pressure” in Bing.com generates lots of useful info and suggested links. When ComputerWorld ran the query on Google.com, the GOOG spit out a list of results. Well, that’s not exactly true. The Google has some nifty health search features, but they are only available for certain terms.
Run the ComputerWorld Bing.com query for this phrase: lung cancer. Click around. There is some useful “discover engine” features. Now run the query on Google. Hit end and look about half way down the results list until you see:
Click on the “Google Health Link” and you should see this:
What’s this “standard results list” assertion? The reality is that Google has some nifty health related features but these have not been widely publicized. Google assumes that bright users will connect the dots themselves. The ComputerWorld article does not connect the dots, which is all to common. People assume they know how to search (false assumption) and that they know how to use Google’s system (false assumption). Google does not do much to correct these types of analyses of their system and its services.
Now let’s think about this comment:
Neither Microsoft nor Google does a particular good job with their consumer medical records sites yet. Microsoft HealthVault is slightly superior to Google Health because it appears to have more sites from which you can automatically grab health information, such as pharmacies. But at this point, neither is particularly useful.
I don’t agree. Both companies have made improvements in their medical records functions. The difference is that there are other companies in the consumer medical record business. Microsoft wants to get its platform into the game. Google is doing its “meh” stuff. What’s going to happen is that cost and transformation will become larger and larger factors.
The Google has the right stuff when it comes to content transformation and the tricks its numerical recipes can perform. Microsoft approaches transformation by trying to get everything on Microsoft technologies.
Right now, Microsoft’s push is easier for pundits to see and describe. It is a familiar approach as the ComputerWorld article demonstrates. Google does its “meh” thing and chug chugs along, moving so slowly that its incremental advances are tough to discern just like the search example for lung cancer. If you don’t know where to look, you may miss something that is sitting in front of hundreds of millions of Google users completely unseen. Of course, real journalists don’t miss the obvious or do they?
Stephen E Arnold, January 20, 2010
A freebie. Due to the medical nature of this write up, I will send an email to the administrator of Walter Reed Hospital, a fine facility.
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