In his return to blogging on Friday, Bosworth confirmed that he's starting a company and hiring people but he didn't say what, where or who.

How isn't too mysterious. He said he's already written prototype code, and he can probably fund a company himself after all the time he spent with Borland, Microsoft, Crossgain, BEA and Google.

Even without providing details, Bosworth had a few people ask in the comments area how they could submit resumes.

A health-related startup seems obvious since that was what he was doing at Google's New York office and he's passionate about the subject, after helping his mother during a long battle with cancer.

There was a sense of urgency in his blogging last year about the need for better systems to share, access and manage personal health records. I wonder if he wanted to move faster than Google could in this area.

But would he dare moon another giant?

If you don't recall the story about Bosworth's last startup, it was an Overlake software company that Microsoft hobbled by invoking non-compete agreements with Bosworth and other ex-Microsoft people involved.

Maybe Microsoft was mooning him back last week when it announced the HealthVault, a promising service that sounds a lot like the sort of healthcare information project that Bosworth was working on at Google's New York office.

Here's an excerpt from his Nov. 2006 entry on the official Google blog:

Patients also need to be able to better coordinate and manage their own health information. We believe that patients should control and own their own health information, and should be able to do so easily. Today it is much too difficult to get access to one's health records, for example, because of the substantial administrative obstacles people have to go through and the many places they have to go to collect it all. Compare this to financial information, which is much more available from the various institutions that help manage your financial "health." We believe our industry should help solve this problem.

Here's a quote from Microsoft's HealthVault press release:

"People are concerned to find themselves at the center of the healthcare ecosystem today because they must navigate a complex web of disconnected interactions between providers, hospitals, insurance companies and even government agencies," said Peter Neupert, corporate vice president of the Health Solutions Group at Microsoft. "Our focus is simple: to empower people to lead healthy lives. The launch of HealthVault makes it possible for people to collect their private health information on their terms and for companies across the health industry to deliver compatible tools and services built on the HealthVault platform."

I'm not saying Microsoft took Bosworth's ideas from the Google blog, just that they were working on the same stuff in parallel.

Now he's starting his own company. Maybe he found an angle that Google's not pursuing, or maybe he's mooning two giants at once?

Either way, I'll bet he gets resumes from Seattle, Redmond and maybe even Kirkland.