A generally good article, but the last section, which discussed online medical records, was a bit vague. First, the author doesn't distinguish between enterprise health information systems (which doctors/hospitals use internally to create and maintain health records), and personal health records (such as Microsoft HealthVault and Google Health, which let patients aggregate their health information from different institutions). Although these two spaces are highly complementary (since health data will be interchanged between the two), they are different applications with different business models. Think of it as the difference between the software that Bank of America uses internally to manage its customer accounts, and a personal finance app like Quicken Online.<p>So when the author talks about VCs investing heavily in stealth challengers to Microsoft and Google, I'm not sure what he's referring to. The main reason Microsoft and Google are moving slowly is that the adoption of personal health records requires a lot of infrastructural changes: affiliations with hospitals/insurers/medical device makers/employers, adoption of standards for the exchange of medical information, and overcoming concerns over privacy and security. As a result, even if these startups emerge in 2009 with technology or business models that beat Google/Microsoft, I think it would realistically take at least a couple of years for them to gain traction. I would love to be proven wrong, though.