It's easy to bash Microsoft.

From its CEO, to its massively popular operating system, the company does not exude the cool, hip style of Apple. Nor does it exude the wide-eyed optimism or Google.

For these reasons, and others, Microsoft is regularly bashed by the tech-set who drool over Apple and Google.

It's not just the tech scene. Wall Street is cool to Microsoft. After crushing earnings, Microsoft's stock is underperforming the market.

Well instead of piling on, we're going the other way. Of all the major tech companies out there, Microsoft is one of the most successfully diversified, exciting companies going.

It has two major cash cows, but it's also grown 8 billion dollar businesses in the last decade. Does anyone think Google, or even Apple, could do that?

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See Also:

• Microsoft Slams Yahoo Japan-Google Deal As "Anticompetitive"
• Ex-Microsoftie: Microsoft No Longer A Growth Company, It Should Slash R&D
• Microsoft Blows Away Expectations

Here’s today’s roundup of tech news in case you missed ‘em:

• Nokia is looking to bring some new blood into the company and SAI takes a look at 10 problematic Nokia phones unveiled over the years.

• Citigroup unveils a new feature of its iPhone app: a security flaw. The banking company asked all customers to upgrade to the latest version of its app to avoid exposure to vulnerabilities in security.

• Speaking of security problems, AT&T is not saying how many customers had their private info up for grabs in last month’s iPad security breach.

• WikiLeaks publishes 90,000 classified military documents on known ties between Pakistan and the Afghanistan Taliban.

• The government says it’s perfectly okay for you to jailbreak your iPhone. Steve, you’ll just have to deal.

• Everyone wants a part of the Groupon craze, including Yelp, who is testing the use of “time-limited local deals,” according to TechCrunch.

• Google “downplays” problems they’ve had meeting a June 30 deadline to take over the Los Angeles government email system.

• Download the 6 BlackBerry apps you’ll need as a business traveler.

• AT&T is setting up a new Wi-Fi hot zone in Charlotte, N.C., hoping to alleviate the pressures on 3G networks.

• If your computer screen isn’t 27″, on Tuesday, Apple can solve your problem. The tech company is rumored to be announcing a 27″ cinema display, along with (maybe) the Magic Trackpad.

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AOL wants to a hire a VP for its music business

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AVC regular Charlie Crystle asked me this question yesterday in the comments:

Fred, it might be helpful to some of your readers to explain when a startup should seek angel vs seed/early stage VC. 

If I need $250,000 to get to 100 customers, or $1 million to get to X, and I can raise both amounts from either Angels or VCs, where do we turn? 

And let’s say both have significant interest, and the terms are the same, which is a better choice? (I no longer have an opinion on this, having gone both directions).

There are really two questions in here. The first is when you should SEEK angel vs VC and the second is if you have the option of taking money from both what you should do.

On the first, I believe entrepreneurs should seek angel money when their product is not yet complete, is not in the market and thus they cannot demonstrate real market traction to investors. There are multiple reasons for this and I’ll try to articulate the most important of them.

A company without a product in the market is a very risky proposition. Some VC firms will invest at this stage but I am not sure its entirely appropriate for VCs to invest at this stage. Our firm will do it when we are backing a serial entrepreneur with a super strong track record that we are very familiar with. Otherwise, we stand on the sidelines and watch with interest but no capital at risk. A syndicate of angels, each with a small amount of capital at risk in the project, is a much more appropriate source of capital for a company at this stage because the risk has been well syndicated among the group.

Angels are also more hands off and I believe hands off investors are better for a company where defining, building, and tuning product is the primary exercise. VCs have a responsibility to their partners, both the partners in their firm and the partners who fund their firm, to be highly engaged in the business. So like it or not, they are going to be engaged in the business. I think it is best when that engagement is applied to a product that is in the market and gaining traction, and building the business is the primary exercise.

Finally, selling a VC on a concept on a whiteboard is a very hard sale. It is extremely time consuming with very little chance of success. Selling an angel on a concept is much easier. So simply in terms of where you should spend your time raising capital, angels are a better target in the “concept to product” stage.

The second question, what to do if you have the option of taking money from both sources on the same terms, is more interesting in many ways.

My answer is do both, if you can. When we participate in seed rounds, we most often do it by ourselves with a syndicate of high quality angels. We have done this at least a dozen times now and it works extremely well. We behave as if we are one of the angels and try to be relatively hands off. And we hope that the angels will add value just as they do in their other syndicates where there is not a VC firm involved.

But when the company needs another round of financing, we are there to provide more financing. Sometimes the angels follow in the successive rounds. But mostly they do not. It really doesn’t matter, because we can fund the company on our own as long as the capital requirements are modest.

This is our preferred model and we have used it with great success. I think it benefits entrepreneurs the most as well. There are a number of VC firms that use this model. I first saw it practiced by Brad Feld about a decade ago in the seed deals he was doing in the Boulder area when he was at Mobius and I admired it immediately.

If for some reason, you must choose between VCs and angels, then I would choose a VC firm, as long as you have a very good relationship with the firm and the specific individual who will be leading the investment from the firm. In almost every situation, you are going to need more than one round and VCs can and will do multiple rounds and angels often cannot.

I will end this with a comment on the emerging seed and super seed fund models. They exist somewhere between angels and VCs and some are growing and turning into full blown VCs as I have mentioned recently in another blog post on this topic. Seed and super seed funds are “institutional angels” and as such I would mostly categorize them as angels. But many of them do have more capital at their disposal and can, at times, provide additional rounds of funding. So in some ways they are a hybrid. A syndicate of a seed fund or super seed fund and angels is a great way to go if you can put that together. A syndicate of a VC, a seed fund, and some angels might even be better.

To finish this post, I think entrepreneurs should target angels and seed funds when they are pre-launch but if they have the opportunity to pair a VC firm with angels and seed funds into a single syndicate they should do that because it will provide most stable funding platform for the business going forward.

Fred Wilson is a partner at Union Square Ventures. He writes the influential A VC, where this post was originally published.

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See Also:

• A Russian Spy’s Guide To Dealing With Angel Investors
• How To Find A Great Angel Investor
• The Amazing Disappearing Angel Round — And Why It’s Worth Preserving

Chatroulette tries to eradicate the perverts. New warning on site reads, “Broadcasting inappropriate content to minors is a violation of both US and UN law. We are actively cooperating with law enforcement agencies.”

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Here’s today’s roundup of tech news in case you missed ‘em:

• Dell has to dig deep — the company is paying $100 million to settle charges filed against them by the SEC.

• Microsoft is doing quite well, thank you very much: they’ve earned $16.04 billion in revenue to be exact.

• Despite that, is there a coup brewing at Microsoft?

• Flipboard is having problems running Facebook and Twitter after too many users installed the app.

• Looking to jump ship to a new job? Here’s a list of the 25 best tech companies to work for.

• Amazon’s Q2 earnings are underwhelming, but the Kindle has been shown to be performing well. Don’t discount them yet.

• AT&T manages a good second quarter, despite introducing limited data plans to its customers.

• Multitasking on the iPhone allows Skype to run in the background and receive phone calls.

• Apple has been labeled as “the company with the most security vulnerabilities,” according to an article in Ars Technica.

• AOL launches an HTML5 mobile site and two Android apps, which gives users location-based weather updates and traffic (among other things).

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I think the collective awe of health care aficionados at the href=”http://www.oscon.com/oscon2010″>Open Source Convention came
to a focal point during our evening Birds of a Feather session, when
open source advocate Fred Trotter, informally stepping in as session
leader, pointed out that the leaders of key open source projects in
the health care field were in the room, including two VistA
implementors (Medsphere and href=”http://www.worldvista.org/”>WorldVistA), href=”http://www.tolvenhealth.com/”>Tolven, and href=”http://wwwf.oemr.org/”>openEMR–and not to forget two other
leading health care software initiatives from the U.S. government, href=”http://www.connectopensource.org”>CONNECT and href=”http://nhindirect.org/”>NHIN Direct.

This meeting, which drew about 40 doctors, project leaders,
programmers, activist patients, and others, was the culmination of a
full day of presentations in the first track on health care at an
O’Reilly conference. The day’s sessions unveiled the potential of open
source in health care and how dedicated implementors were making it a
reality, starting with an scene-setting talk by Tim O’Reilly that
attracted over 75 people and continuing through the next seven hours
until a dwindling hard core delayed drinks and hors d’oeuvres for half
an hour to hear a final late talk by href=”http://www.oscon.com/oscon2010/public/schedule/detail/13943″>Melanie
Swan on DIYgenomics.

Nine talks representing the breadth of a vital programming area can’t
be summarized in one sentence, but for me the theme of the day was
open source advocates reaching out to solve pressing problems that
proprietary vendors will not or cannot address.

Tim O’Reilly’s talk laid out key elements of the health care
revolution: electronic records, the quantified self (measuring one’s
bodily activities), and the Internet of things that allows one to track
behavior such as whether a patient has taken his medicine.

Talk to me

We were honored to have key leaders from Health and Human Services
speak at today’s conferences about its chief open source projects. href=”http://www.oscon.com/oscon2010/public/schedule/detail/13257″>David
Riley and Brian Behlendorf (known best for his work on Apache)
came from the Office of the National Coordinator along with lead
contractor href=”http://www.oscon.com/oscon2010/public/schedule/detail/15304″>Arien
Malec to show us the current status and–most exciting–the future
plans for CONNECT and NHIN Direct, which are key pieces of the
Administration’s health care policy because they allow different
health care providers to exchange patient information securely.

I have href=”http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/07/health-and-human-services-fina.html”>written
recently about “meaningful use” for health care records. Malec
provided a homespun and compelling vision of the problems with the
current health care system: in contrast to the old days where doctors
knew every patient personally, modern health care is delivered as
episodic interventions. As Fred Trotter said in his talk, we’ve
reached the limit of what we can achieve through clinical efforts.
Doctors can do miracles compared to former times, but the problems we
suffer from increasingly call for long-range plans. Malec said that
health care systems need to remember us. That’s what
electronic health records can do, combined with the data exchange
protocols provided by NHIN.

Riley, in what is likely to be one of the most revisited talks of the
conference–yes, we recorded the sessions and will put them
online–rapidly laid out the architecture of CONNECT and what’s
planned for upcoming releases. Requests between agencies for health
care data have gone from months to minutes with CONNECT. Currently
based on SOAP, it is being refactored so that in the future it can run
over REST, XMPP, and SMTP.

NHIN Direct, the newer and more lightweight protocol, is also based on
digital certificates and uses S/MIME with SMTP over TLS. Parties can
do key exchange themselves or work through a trusted third party. It
seems to me, therefore, that CONNECT and NHIN Direct will eventually
merge. It is as if the NHIN Direct project was started to take a big
step back from CONNECT, look at what it achieved for the government
agencies that produce or consume health care and how the same benefits
could be provided to health care providers all over the country, and
to formalize an architecture that would become the new CONNECT.

NHIN is an even more impressive case of open government and
collaborative development than CONNECT. The public was involved from
the earliest design stage. Some people complained that established
vendors bent the process to preserve their advantages, but they
probably had less success this way than if HHS followed normal
government procedures. NHIN already has reference implementations in
Java and C#. If you’re inspired to help bring health records to the
public, you can read the wikis and attend some training and contribute
reference implementations in your language of choice.

In addition to supporting the NHIN Direct protocol, some of the
upcoming features in CONNECT include:

• Identity management services. This will probably be based on a
  voluntary patient identifier.

• Support for meaningful use criteria.

• Support for structured data, allowing the system to accept input in
  standards such as the CCR or CCD and populate documents. One feature
  enabled by this enhancement will be the ability to recognize sensitive
  health data and remove it before sending a record. (CONNECT can be
  used for all health-related data, not just personal medical records.)

• Moving to the Spring Framework.

Riley has done some pretty rigorous cost analysis and determines that
careful management–which includes holding costs down and bringing
multiple agencies together to work on CONNECT–has reduced development
costs from over 200 million dollars to about 13 million dollars.
Recent code sprints drew heavily from community volunteers: 4 or 5
volunteers along with 12 contractors.

In an href=”http://www.oscon.com/oscon2010/public/schedule/detail/15296″>overview
talk, Deborah Bryant of OSU Open Source Lab raised the issue
continuity in relation to NHIN and CONNECT. Every open source project
has to figure out how to keep a community of volunteers interested so
that the project continues to evolve and adapt to changing
circumstances. Government-backed projects, she admitted, provide
funding over a sustained period of time, but this does not obviate the
need for community management.

In addition, CONNECT is run by a consulting firm with paid contractors
who have to learn how to accept community input and communicate with
outsiders. Behlendorf said that simple things like putting all code
in Subversion and all documentation on a wiki helps. Consultants are
also encouraged to request feedback on designs and to talk about the
goals of sprints as far as possible in advance.

IntraHealth International manages the basic health care resource:
people

The problems of the developing world were represented most directly by
the open source human resource information system href=”http://www.intrahealth.org/”>IntraHealth International,
presented by href=”http://www.oscon.com/oscon2010/public/schedule/detail/15268″>
Carl Leitner. IntraHealth International helps many Sub-Saharan and
South Asian countries manage one of their most precious and dwindling
resources: health care professionals. The system, called iHRIS lets
individual hospitals as well as whole nations determine where their
most pressing staffing needs lie, break down staff by demographic
information such as age and gender (even language can be tracked), and
track their locations.

Training is one of the resources that must be managed carefully. If
you know there’s a big gap between the professionals you need and ones
you have, you can direct scarce funding to training new ones. When
iHRIS records expenditures, what do countries often find? Some
administrator has splurged on sending himself to the same training
program over and over, just to get the per diem. Good information can
expose graft.

Open source is critical for a system like iHRIS, not just because
funds are scarce, but because localization is critical. Lots of
languages whose very existence is hidden from proprietary vendors need
to be supported. Each country also has different regulations and
conditions. IntraHealth International holds regular unconferences,
mentoring, and other forms of training in its target countries in the
hope of (in Leitner’s words) putting themselves out of business. Of
course, trained IT staff tend to drift into higher-paying jobs, so the
organization tries to spread the training over many people.

OpenEMR and Tolven

The overarching challenge for any electronic health record system, if
its developers hope it to be taken seriously over the next couple
years in the United States, is support for meaningful use criteria.
Proprietary systems have, for several decades, met the needs of large
institutions with wads of cash to throw at them. And they will gain
certification to support meaningful use as well. But smaller providers
have been unable to afford these systems.

The need for an open source solution with meaningful use certification
is pressing, and two project leaders of OpenEMR devoted href=”http://www.oscon.com/oscon2010/public/schedule/detail/14893″>their
talk to their push to make their system ready. They estimate that
they have implemented about 80% of the required functionality, but
more slowly than expected. Extraordinary measures were required on
many fronts:

• Medical experts had to read thousands of pages of specifications as
  they came out, and follow comments and debates to determine which
  requirements would likely be dropped or postponed, so as not to waste
  development time.

• Contractors were hired to speed up the coding. Interestingly, the
  spike in productivity created by the contractors attracted a huge
  number of new volunteers. At one point openEMR became number 37 on
  SourceForge in terms of activity, and it is still up around 190. The
  project leaders had to upgrade some of their infrastructure to handle
  an increased number of commits. They also discovered that lack of
  documentation was a hindrance. Like the CONNECT team, they found that
  maintaining a community required–well, maintenance.

• Project leaders had to go to Washington and argue with government
  bureaucrats to change requirements that would have essentially made it
  impossible for open source projects to meet the meaningful use
  requirements. They succeeded in removing the offending clauses, and
  believe they were also responsible for winning such accomplishments as
  allowing sites to certify modules instead of entire stand-alone
  systems. Nevertheless, some aspects of certification require
  contracts with proprietary vendors, such as lab interface, which is
  done through a proprietary company, and drug-to-drug and
  drug-to-allergy interactions, which require interaction with expensive
  databases.

Tony McCormick pointed out that the goal of meaningful use
certification provided a focus that most open source projects lack.
In addition, the government provided tests (called scripts) that
served as a QA plan.

Meaningful use, as much as it represents an advance over today’s
health information silos, does not yet involve the patient. The
patient came to the fore in two other talks, one by href=”http://www.oscon.com/oscon2010/public/schedule/detail/13943″>Melanie
Swan on her company DIYgenomics and the other by href=”http://www.oscon.com/oscon2010/public/schedule/detail/15051″>Tom
Jones on Tolven.

Swan summarized the first two generations of DNA sequencing (which
went a bit above my head) and said we were on the verge of a third
generation that could bring full genome sequencing down to a cost that
consumers could afford. A part of the open science movement,
DIYgenomics helps patients combine with others to do research, a
process that is certainly less rigorous than controlled experiments
but can provide preliminary data that suggests future research. For
many rare conditions, the crowdsourced approach can fill a gap that
professional researchers won’t fill.

In addition to providing access to studies and some other useful
apps–such as one that helps you evaluate your response to
drugs–DIYgenomics conducts its own longitudinal studies. One current
study checks for people who do not absorb vitamin B12 (folic acid)
properly, a condition to which up to half the population is
vulnerable. Another study, for which they are seeking 10,000
participants, covers aging.

Jones’s talk centered on privacy, but spread its tent to include the
broader issues of patient-centered medicine. Tolven simultaneously
supports records held by the doctor (clinical health records) and by
the patient (personal health records).

In a system designed especially for the Netherlands–where privacy
laws are much stricter and better specified than in the United
States–Tolven stores medical records in large, centralized
repositories because it’s easier to ensure security that way. However,
strict boundaries between doctors prevent them from viewing each
other’s data. Even more significantly, data is encrypted during both
transmission and storage, and only the patient has the key to unlock
it. Audit trails add another layer of protection.

In this architecture, there are no release forms. Instead, the patient
explicitly approves every data transfer. (Patients can designate
special repositories to which their relatives have access, in case of
emergencies when they’re not competent to make the transfer.)

That was one day of health care at OSCon–two more are coming up. We
started our evening BOF with introductions, but more and more people
kept coming in the room, and everyone was so interesting that the
introductions ended up taking the entire hour allocated for the BOF.
The sense that our health care system needs to change radically, and
the zeal expressed to take part in that change, brought energy into
the room. This was a great place to meet like-minded people.

Google’s Nexus One store is officially dead: Google has sold out of its direct-sales stock of HTC Nexus One phones, and if you want to buy one, you’ll have to do it through one of Google’s carrier partners.

The whole idea was that Google was going to disrupt wireless carriers by selling smartphones directly to consumers.

But it didn’t work — people didn’t want to buy expensive smartphones without trying them out first. So Google didn’t sell enough phones to keep its service around. (And Google had other big problems, such as lame customer service.)

A message on what used to be the Nexus One store now says:

Sorry, folks…

The Nexus One is no longer available for purchase directly from Google. For more information on how to purchase the Nexus One, check out our help center.

The Nexus One store launched on Jan. 5, meaning it survived almost 200 days. That’s longer than Microsoft’s Kin phone lasted, and even longer than some of Google’s other bombs, including the Lively virtual world.

Don’t miss: 10 Tech Flops That Survived Longer Than The Microsoft Kin

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See Also:

• 10 Tech Flops That Survived Longer Than The Microsoft Kin
• What’s Up With All The GIANT Android Phones?
• The Next 5 Apple Gadgets To Waste Your Time Obsessing About

Nokia is looking for a new CEO, the WSJ reports, as the world’s biggest cellphone maker is looking more irrelevant by the day. One reason why: Its refusal to buy Palm, which could have solved its huge technology problem.

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We’re hardwired to play games. We play them for fun. We play them in our social interactions. We play them at work.

That last one is tricky. “Games” and “work” don’t seem like a natural pairing. Their coupling in the workplace either implies goofing off (the fun variant) or office politics (the not-so-fun type).

Dave Gray, Sunni Brown, and James Macanufo, co-authors of the upcoming book “Gamestorming,” have a different perspective. They contend that an embrace and understanding of game mechanics can yield benefits in many work environments, particularly those where old hierarchical models are no longer applicable.

In the following Q&A, Gray discusses the collaborative power of games and how they can cut through increasing workplace complexity.

What is Gamestorming?

Dave Gray: Gamestorming is a set of collaboration practices that originated in Silicon Valley in the 1970s and has been evolving ever since. It’s an approach that emphasizes quick, ad-hoc organization of teams so they can rapidly co-design and co-develop ideas. As my co-authors and I observed these practices, they seemed to look more like games than any other form of work we were familiar with. Hence the term “gamestorming.”

Is each of us playing some sort of game all the time?

DG: In a sense we’re always playing games of one sort or another. “Game” is a big word that can have many meanings. For example, “game-playing,” “gaming the system,” “getting your head in the game,” and so on.

In this context, games are simply a way to put structure around the chaos of creative work. The game rules are a way of distributing information into the space you are working in, and distributing power equally among the people in a group. They are a method for flattening hierarchy, increasing engagement, and just generally speeding things up.

Does Gamestorming require specific skills?

DG: Gamestorming is primarily a mindset. It’s an approach to work that’s about engaging people in collaboratory activities. It’s not a game if people are forced to play, so you need to have people and projects that stir people’s curiosity and emotion. The Gamestorming skills are synthesizing and social skills, like visualization, improvisation, good listening and language skills.

Can games apply in any organization? Or, are there jobs and industries where it’s less effective?

DG: Gamestorming is a great approach when you are entering into unknown territory, when you need to imagine or design for the future, and when you need to tap creative energy. What games are best at is facilitating collaboration and innovation. Where the work is predictable, or where you want consistency, games are not the solution. You don’t want people playing too many games in the accounting department.

What is the relationship between complexity and game mechanics?

DG: The world is only getting more complex, and the more complex a system gets the less predictable it is. Games are a way to create simplified systems that mirror the real world. Plus, they’re a safe place to try out various scenarios and see what kinds of results are possible. You can tweak one or two variables and see how that affects the system.

How has workplace motivation changed as we’ve moved into a knowledge economy?

DG: In a traditional industrial setting, say, a factory, it’s easy to see what everybody is doing and how what they do fits into the bigger picture. It’s easy to see when people are working and when they are slacking off.

But in a knowledge economy, where people are all moving symbols around on screens, and many work from home or the road, it’s harder to coordinate the work. Fundamentally, in a knowledge economy, you want people to be creative. That means you need them to be interested, passionate and engaged. The modern cubicle layout and the intangibility of the work makes it difficult. You need to find ways to make it easier for people to share their work and the excitement they have for it. You need to fan the flames.

Related:

• Make Life More Like Games
• Foursquare wants to be the mayor of location apps