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Microsoft Says Google Trying To Undermine Windows Phone
First time accepted submitter Bent Spoke writes "In a bit of delicious irony, Microsoft laments Google is not playing fair by excluding access to meta-data on YouTube, preventing the development of the kind of powerful app readily available on Android. From the article: 'In a blog post on Wednesday, Microsoft VP and deputy general counsel Dave Heiner said the software giant has spent two years trying to get a first-class YouTube app running on Windows Phone, but to no avail, thanks to the Chocolate Factory's stonewalling.
"YouTube apps on the Android and Apple platforms were two of the most downloaded mobile applications in 2012, according to recent news reports," Heiner wrote. "Yet Google still refuses to allow Windows Phone users to have the same access to YouTube that Android and Apple customers enjoy."'"
Microsoft, you have just experienced the concept known as "khama".
I'm sure the 3 WP users are extremely upset over this.
Incompetence?
Lawyers?
That's how it is called in French :D
Namely they already know what happens when you let Microsoft embrace your APis. They already know what happens next, and would like to avoid that future
Maybe, just maybe, Microsoft shouldn't be complaining so much when they block or use non-standard protocols on their devices, in particular WP ones:
- Skydrive, the more or less standard way to get stuff in and out of Windows Phones, doesn't implement WebDAV in a open manner, making it difficult to use with Linux or BSD;
- The hardware search button in Windows Phone is tied to bing, and users can't change it;
- Windows Phone doesn't support standard protocols (standard MTP, USB file access) to access its filesystem, so it doesn't play well with Linux or BSD;
- Windows RT and Windows Phone specify a locked bootloader, so that users can't install anything else on their devices;
I could go on and on here, but these 4 examples should be enough... They really should fix their act before complaining that others aren't playing fair.
If Microsoft's allegations are true and there is no reasonably technical justification for it then there is nothing to celebrate here.
Of course, my first reaction was "payback's a bitch" like many others, but in the end a monopoly based on Linux is still a monopoly.
According to TFA:
If Google are in fact doing this, then I can fully understand why Microsoft would be justified to complain. However given Microsoft's past tactics in trying to undermine the competition, perhaps they should eat humble pie. Anti-competitive browser tactics through bundling, non-compliant standards (IE6), deliberately making it hard for SAMBA to integrate with AD, these are just two things that have personally turned me against Microsoft in the past. More recently, launching Twitter campaigns to try and spread Android FUD and on the other complaining that Google aren't playing fair? Take a look in the mirror Microsoft.
I would say that it serves Microsoft right, but unfortunately it's the end users that suffer.
Yeah, all both of them.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Microsoft VP and deputy general counsel Dave Heiner
What the FUCK is a FUCKING lawyer doing working as a FUCKING VP for a software company?
Apple just let Google create a Youtube app after they failed to agree on API access. the iPhone is way more popular than Windows Phone devices, so it made financial sense for Google to do so. So maybe MIcrosoft should offer to pay Google to create an app for Windows Phone.
Don't bother, there is at least one application that proves the GP is full of shit.
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
Airborne chairs?
It's a term used by The Register as a token of their ongoing hatred of Google. In the context of Willy Wonka, it's a sort of backhanded compliment. It implies their resentment of any suspiciously clever software being brewed in Mountain View. Your average El Reg staffer, if he has any tech chops at all, is about the level of a low to midrange MCSE. Take their OpEds with a handful of salt.
Are you on crack, or just talking out your ass? There are at least 15 reasonably general-purpose YouTube clients on the Windows Phone app store, and many more that are specialized to things like specific channels, or downloading just the audio track, etc. Where the hell did you get the idea that MS doesn't allow third-party YouTube apps?
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Microsoft seems to be experiencing what it is like when someone plays their game on them. That whiney sound is the smallest violin....
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
I feel a bit like most people here: That Microsoft deserves it. But it somehow also feels like the wrong way if this is indeed the case as Microsoft claiims.
If Microsoft believes this is why Windows Phone isn't getting user adoption, they are mistaken. Google needs to give them less to complain about. But I have to ask why would Google let Apple do it but not Microsoft? Surely there is something different about Microsoft's approach to it. Didn't I read yesterday something about a patent infringement case between Motorola and Microsoft where Microsoft believess it has the rights to a video codec while Motorola says "no, we're not a member of the license pool" and Microsoft says "Google owns you and Google is in the pool?" I wonder if this is related somehow.
I get that this meta data is the detail claimed to be at issue, but you know... it's not as easy to complain about actual things presently being decided by the courts. Also, in the article, there was talk about Google dropping support for a proprietary protocol in favor of open standards. Why Microsoft has to complain about that I don't know. Maybe perhaps because they believe they are still the ones setting the standards.
There are Windows Phone users?
But, I wanted socialized health insurance!
block device level access which basically forces the media to be formatted as FAT to be interoperable
Huh, what? All my USB devices are formatted as ext3 or ext4. I don't need no FAT on my devices, FAT is obsolete, not USB mass storage.
...Google will write that app for the Windows Phone platform when they consider the platform to have enough adopters to make the effort worthwhile. Perhaps they should start with a Symbian based client. Follow that up with a WebOS based one as well.
You never know...
Desire to have "Microsoft" or "Windows" in user agent string at any cost?
And Skype doesn't work on Android, and contrary to djsmiley's comment yesterday, a trivial search shows it doesn't work, these have been reported many times.
This is nothing to do with Google, it's Microsoft that can't deliver that. Microsoft have not delivered even a basic youtube app, they could simply parse the webpage data, but they don't. I use things like MediaShare that does provide a youtube interface without all the incompetent whining.
Copied from my posts yesterday:
1. Video is upside down, if you rotate the device, then both the camera and video playback are upside down, but the other person does see you right way up in that case. Do a search [skype upside down video] and you'll see this has been reported to them lots of times.
2. Video is landscape only & very fuzzy, but the camera video is not fuzzy, probably the compression?
3. Audio plays back very very quietly even with full volume.
4. Lag, lots of it. (I've been told they route all connections through their own servers in the US, which explains the new found lag).
5. Occasionally Skype gets in a state where the Android tablet won't go into hibernation until you force-kill Skype. This really sucks down the battery juice.
6. Call receive ring is very quiet, even with full volume.
7. It doesn't handle timezones properly. It is 9am, a new event happened at 2am, it is not listed in the 'Today' section, it is listed in the 'Some time ago' section. What is listed in the 'TODAY' section is from 'YESTERDAY' at 18:48! (Does it get the timezone from somewhere other than the phone? Because that won't work now, the phone travels, desk computers don't, you can't assume a fixed timezone per user now).
the bottom line is this: because of all the above, the migration away from this closed-shop monolith is happening - and the RATE at which it's happening is ramping up extremely quickly.
In short, we are witnessing the beginning of the end of the monopoly.
*** Don't be dull.***
They are also the creators of the term "Freetard" used to reference anyone questioning the current "Intellectual Property" regime.
This gives you an idea of how they drifted. They used to be "bitting the hand that feeds IT", but no more. They used to get information from IT contacts inside companies. Now they are becoming standard journalist that are too dependent on the goodwill of PR departments.
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
It's not an issue with the web service, but the absence of a native application and Google's refusal to provide the tools by which a thirdparty developer could create one.
That said, it's Google's ball, they don't have to share if they don't want to. I suspect it has more to do with Windows Phone's small installed base than an effort to disadvantage WP. As iOS shows, Google wants to make money off other people's hardware.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Except Google are not doing the same. I thought there was some meta data missing (the keywords text), but when I checked the youtube webpage headers, no, Youtube puts it in the keywords header field! It's right there, grab a webpage and take a look.
I see Bing already scrapes the description data, for some reason they don't index the keywords data, but they should, youtube keywords data is the data that users enter with their videos, not SEO spam.
I see the Views Count is right there on the webpage, so they can even get the viewing rank if they want. It's even in a span labelled
class="watch-view-count"
So Microsoft gets *all* the metadata for the video, including all the stuff the user enters, description, keywords, views etc. and they currently use part of it already in Bing.
IMHO, it's just incompetence. They just don't seem to be able to do *anything* these days. I remember the Microsoft whose products could be guaranteed to be technically excellent, and I look at the modern day Microsoft with despair.
Their stuff is garbage, they have 100 times the programmers, yet they don't seem to be able to do anything.
Microsoft has shown throughout their history that they are more than willing to screw any and all competitors, legally or otherwise. And now they are complaining because Google won't play nice? Well boo-frickin-hoo. I'm not trying to suggest that Google is any better. Or Apple. Or Oracle. Or Facebook. They are all just big evil silicon valley companies. None of them seem to be happy unless they are suing someone. It just seems to me that MS wrote the playbook for this type of behavior and now it's coming back to haunt them.
Can't we all just...get along?
They say "fight fire with fire". As soon as Microsoft would stop harrasing other Android vendors with their lawyers bringing bogus claims and "don't try this" attitude, I would assume your point valid. Yet I see Microsoft crying foul and AT THE SAME TIME doing way more cruel things to Android vendors than what Google is doing to them.
If you read or hear on how to treat psychopats getting in your way, you discover that first thing is to do (besides avoiding them) set aside ANY moral issues you have. Otherwise you get instant disadvantage because psychopats - like sharks - tend to have no empathy nor moral constraints at all. I'm bringing this up because corporate entities are the ultimate psychopats (and we still hear everywhere that "corporations are people" crap). Especially those built on deception from the start, like Microsoft.
People in the US of A have to learn what people in old communist countries leaned in their time. Double standards are forced upon us and if "we the people" don't adapt, we're in disadvantage. According to corporate executives and wall street money junkies we, ordinary people are all second class citizens. Why should we treat them differently ?
Isn't the reason you are forced to FAT that the other FS aren't readily available on windows?
On Windows, it's either FAT over USB Mass Storage, UDF over USB Mass Storage, or MTP. USB devices that include storage as one of several functions should implement MTP for the same reason that several network attached storage (NAS) devices implement FTP, NFS, or SMB instead of something like iSCSI. MTP operates at a level of files, not disk blocks, which frees clients from having to understand the server's or device's file system.
Their weapons are incompetence, lawyers and flying chairs.