When Blackberry announced the PlayBook, they showed off a medical application and how it was being used by orthopedic surgeons and also laid a ground work for enterprise solutions in the healthcare ecosystem. No such thing for Microsoft with the launch of Windows Phone 7.
Their platform itself is extremely exciting – a completely redesigned user interface, phones with great hardware specifications, new partnerships with carriers, and many useful apps on launch. With basically all hospitals running on some iteration of Windows, it would only make sense Microsoft pair its mobile phones and offer some enterprise solutions.
However, the fact that they haven’t made significant headway in the mobile medical market prior to the relaunch of their OS could be seen in two ways. One, they were waiting for a relaunch of their platform, or, more worrisome – they are ignoring the market as a whole.
Time will tell if Microsoft is proactive and seeks out the medical community for mobile enterprise solutions that sync with existing electronic medical record architecture. And Microsoft is not the type of company that has to wait for existing EMR players to come to it – rather, they have the ability to go to the vendors. One thing is for sure, the pundits love Windows Phone 7.
