Microsoft Doesn't 'Get' Consumers (But It's Not Alone)

Back in October, I mocked Microsoft's Steve Ballmer for saying he wanted his company to "...invent everything that's important on the planet."

They'd better get busy, as writer and tech forecaster Mark Anderson notes in Strategic News Service (via the New York Times BITS blog):

"Except for gaming, it is 'game over' for Microsoft in the consumer market. It's time to declare Microsoft a loser in phones. Just get out of Dodge."
...

"Walk the halls at Microsoft and you can see it is not a place that gets consumers."

Walking the halls - a deceptively simple research strategy yet still capable of producing occasional flashes of insight. Try it yourself. Next time you're walking the halls of your local hospital, see if you can figure out what it is they 'get.'

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Michael Porter On Health Care Reform

Michael Porter, writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, proposes "A Strategy For Health Care Reform - Toward A Value-Based System." His proposals are fundamental, lucid and right-on, meaning they're sure to be opposed by some parties to the debate, the so-called "Yes, but..." crowd. Most important, in my opinion, is this: "... electronic medical records will enable value improvement, but only if they support integrated care and outcome measurement. Simply automating current delivery practices will be a hugely expensive exercise in futility. Among our highest near-term priorities is to finalize and then continuously update health information technology (HIT) standards that include precise data definitions (for diagnoses and treatments, for example), an architecture for aggregating data for each patient over time and across providers, and protocols for seamless communication among systems. "Finally, consumers must become much mor...

gapingvoid cartoon #378

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"An Affordable Fix For Modernizing Medical Records"

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