Steve Case Gets A Familiar Competitor In Online Health Space

AOL founder Steve Case has high ambitions for his newly launched consumer health site Revolution Health, but at least at this point, it's not living up to its name. There's a lot of content there, but nothing that looks particularly groundbreaking. Now Microsoft is said to be nearing the launch of its own consumer health portal, and again, it's hoped that the site will bring about a new level of ease and efficiency to this highly complex area. But it's not clear that Microsoft has what it takes to crack the nut, so to speak. Like Revolution Health, it wants to make progress on electronic medical records, but there's little reason to think that Microsoft is in the best position to do this. Other planned services, like medical information search, have been around for a while with little usefulness. It's great that so many well-heeled companies are trying their hands at this, but there's not much reason to be optimistic.