Podcast: Microsoft HealthVault, Zune, SAP and more....

This week on the Dan & David Show Microsoft dominates the news. Today the company introduced HealthVault, and free client application and Microsoft Live service for building and maintaining health records. It's an emerging market that is going to be huge, with Google and others trying to gain favor as the service of record for medical information.

In addition, we discuss Microsoft Office Live Workspace, a new beta service that follows Microsoft’s hybrid client/services model. It's is not a hosted Microsoft Office 2007 or direct competitor to Zoho, Think Free or Google Apps, but a SharePoint in the cloud aimed at consumers for storing and sharing Office documents as well as documents from OpenOffice and other suites. Groove, which Microsoft acquired from Ray Ozzie's (now chief software architect at Microsoft) company, provides the offline capabilities. (See Mary Jo Foley's coverage of everything Microsoft.)

David thinks Google has a better offering than Microsoft, and I am growing weary of Google's presumed greatness at a time when Microsoft has more than $16 billion in revenue associated with an office suite and Google has close to zero. The game has just begun.

David also talks about his proposed bet with Robbie Bach, president of the Microsoft division that includes Zune, who boasted that the Zune will be in 2nd place in terms of market share by the end of the year:

As long as you’re referring to units sold by Christmas 2007 and NPD Group’s aggregated market share numbers for all (flash and hard drive-based) digital media players (the basis of the market share data cited in the Bloomberg story) , I will shave my head on the stage of your choice if Zune is in second place according to NPD’s first post-holiday report on marketshare (my wife is going to kill me when she finds out). The quid pro quo is that you must shave your head on the stage of my choice if it’s not (I’ll even provide a licensed hair stylist).

In addition, I talk about my visit with Peter Zencke, head of R&D for SAP and a member of its Executive Board, and we question whether Microsoft was rebuffed by Facebook, given Steve Ballmer's remarks about Facebook as a fad.

This podcast can be delivered directly to your desktop or MP3 player if you're subscribed to our podcasts (See ZDNet's podcasts: How to tune in). For more the topics covered during the show, search our blog. You can also search the audio by entering a keyword in our podcast player.