And also, it was JUST TONIGHT that I had a “forming/storming/norming/performing” flash from our MSFT training — so it was FREAKY that you mentioned it just now.

Jason

It seems that we disagree as to the best answer to a rather fundamental question: Which comes first, scale or profit?

My premise is that success is more likely when entrepreneurs prioritize the creation of a profitable business model. I think you’ll find this approach strongly aligned with what Christensen wrote in The Innovator’s Solution.

I will grant that there are some notable exceptions outside the company (Google, Facebook) that lost money for years while scaling out and eventually found a monetization strategy that worked. My sense is that this approach is constrained primarily by the patience of the investors.

Second — what I think you’re missing in the analysis is that there are multiple hills for HealthVault to climb on the way to profitability. The primary issue we have right now is not how do we extract the dollars (which we have experimented with in a number of venues), but how do we establish the critical mass of connectivity required to base a business upon.

Our first principles were and remain — without (a) automated connections to clinical data and (b) an ecosystem of value-creating apps — we can’t succeed. We’ve made enormous strides on both of these, but it’s a big and extraordinarily disruptive job. One that we’re committed to finishing.

Anyways, a lot more to discuss here than I can do in this little textbox. But suffice to say — I’m glad your thoughts are part of the discussion — but IMNSHO you’ve jumped the gun on the conclusion.

—S

PS. Your first “model” was wrong — we’ve never used ads as a way to monetize HV, ever. We did create a separate health search capability which has since been folded into Bing, but that was a very separate venture.