Microsoft Ends Another Vertical Market Dalliance?This Time In Healthcare

While Microsoft has been the most successful platform company in history, it periodically has flirted with vertical market-specific businesses with only mixed success. In virtually all cases, it ends up exiting the vertical business. At times, this has been with great financial success, like Expedia, for example. In other cases, not so much. The latest exit is in healthcare. Microsoft is folding its Health Solutions Group into a JV with GE (see release here). The overriding decision in each case was to ensure the core platform business wasn't threatened. Given the dynamics in healthcare, the threat to Microsoft?s platform business in healthcare is greater than ever. The last major platform shift in healthcare was from host-based computing to client-server. When Microsoft entered healthcare, the market was clearly shifting to Unix-based client-server systems but it was able to redirect the shift towards Windows back-end systems. That platform dominance persists 15 years later.

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