Slashdot Mirror
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.
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:
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.
The problem, I think, is that Microsoft is just too large. Some parts of Microsoft are opening up, releasing loads of details about protocols and such, helping opensource projects and even supporting Linux development, while others work in walled gardens, patent wars, and everything else related to competing in the phone & tablet markets.
Why, exactly? You can use Youtube on Woindows phones just fine. They simply don't have an open API for anybody else to write players that interface to it.
Does Twitter have a legal obligation to provide an API for third-party clients? Does Facebook have such an obligation? Does my bank? Does Microsoft have an obligation for its online Word service? Or provide API-level access to Echange servers? Does everybody with a web-facing interface have a legel obligation to provide API-level access for others to use?
And it's not as if Youtube is a monopoly either. My banks online service is as much a monopoly in that case, or Twitter.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
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.
...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...
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.***
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.
Their weapons are incompetence, lawyers and flying chairs.