Why should they eat a humble pie? Were they spared when they did this? They were taken to court, lost and forced to comply. Why should they allow their competitors a free pass if they are not allowed a free pass?
Yes Microsoft has been using undocumented APIs and they have been taken to court over this and lost. Then they were forced to pay and comply. Same should happen to Google.
Also note that MS is not asking Google to create YouTube app. They are asking to not be banned from using the APIs (it is not even about documentation). If we need to follow the Office analogy it would be like releasing the Office document formats (which Microsoft has done).
Every WP user already knows that and it has been discussed multiple times in the WP forums and websites. There are third party apps for youtube that do not have as much functionality (because of the APIs) and often break when Google change something on YouTube. The only news here is that MS have its own (unreleased) app that is waiting for Google's permission to launch and that Google are officially denying them access to the APIs.
You got it wrong. MS does not want Google to develop a YouTube app for WP. They want Google to stop blocking them from releasing a YouTube app. In some (not specified) way Google are restricting access to the APIs for WP. They may be banning the user agent, or not issuing API tokens or simply threatening Microsoft with legal action if they release an YouTube app. In any way MS does not ask Google to do anything except stop blocking them explicitly.
Standards have nothing to do here. There are APIs that Google hides from the competition and uses to strengthen its own OS. If you are looking for analogy it is not MS's use of non-standard whatever. The right analogy is Internet Explorer using undocumented Windows APIs to gain advantage over Netscape or Microsoft not releasing documentation for server (Exchange if I recall correctly) software and thus preventing other companies for developing competing clients. Standards or non-standards it doesn't matter. All that matters here is that WP devices are not given access to the APIs while Android and iOS devices are.
Also all this only matters when the product in question is in a monopoly market position. WP can have all the special MS only stuff it wants as it is obvious that locking something out of WP would not influence the market. However YouTube is in a monopoly position and denying access to its APIs can certainly provide unfair advantage to Android.
Because of the freedom right? We should outbid the people who are willing to pay for the Win8/WP port and make them free by denying them free software.
There is zero chance that MS will not improve it. They are desperate for apps and they approve total crap. They will not ban a quality app. Also the music player has nothing to do with selling music. The player is not related to the files you get from their service.
Bullshit. MS killed this product because everyone hated switching from Expression to VS and back. People just wanted the Expression features in VS. This is great news for everyone who ever used Expression. Also note that MS cannot just drop the features. After all there should be some way to develop pretty UI interfaces on MS platforms.
/. makes this sound like a bad news but the devs who used expression (including the team I work on) view this as really positive move. While Expression Blend/Web/etc. was not a bad product everyone was frustrated that they needed to switch between Expression Whatever and Visual Studio. Everyone just wished features were part of VS as they are supposed to be now. This is not abandoning the tools this is improving the tools. Also this would never meant to compete with Adobe. Expression were tools to create UI for MS dev tools (XAML and Web) and did not include anything like Photoshop. Saying that Expression aimed to compete with Adobe is plain wrong.
Also it is interesting how/. gives negative spin on this move that is considered positive by devs who use the tools. We're doing XAML development and using Blend and our team was quite happy to hear the news. None of us ever liked that Blend (or Expression Web for that matter) features were separate from VS UI designer.
Source? Wikipedia has nothing to say about this and it would be very strange if MS bought a tool from another company to be used with the language they just created (XAML).
It is far fetched to say it is alternative to Adobe. For starters it does not provide an alternative to Photoshop. If you don't provide an alternative to Photoshop how can you provide alternative to Adobe CS? Expression has always been a tool for designing UIs for dev platforms MS supports (i.e. XAML and Web). It was never meant to compete with Adobe head to head. Expression was supposed to be the tool designers would use when working on a project with developers who use MS tools. It ended up being something that takes people out of Visual Studio and while it was relatively good everyone (including designers) was annoyed that the features were not part of VS to begin with.
I like the Blend products' features but I never understood why they were not part of Visual Studio. I've always been frustrated having to switch between the two environments. I consider merging Blend with VS a great step forward.
May be but why should I care. I already own Office 2010 and the 100 EUR price for family pack is low enough that I'll just upgrade if 2010 does not work for me anymore. BTW does LibreOffice have live preview (you just point some formatting option from the menu and it changes the layout on the fly)? I love this feature.
This happened before LibreOffice. I did not use anything too advanced but when I used Draw and Writer at the same time something crashed bad:) I don't even want to think about Base.
When I did this (late 2010) Open Office had some weird undo behavior when you had pictures in the document. You would do something like increase a font which would move pictures to new pages. Say you don't like it you press undo but things won't return to the previous state. It turns out that pictures had some kind of anchor or something that would not be affected by undo. Office 2010 was coming out and it had that killer live preview feature. On one side I had Open Office that could not do proper undo and on the other I had MS Office that could change formatting and undo it just by moving the cursor through the menu. In addition Open Office crashed when I had more than one OO program open. I wanted to work with Writer and Draw at the same time but it seems like a shared component or something caused them to crash.
Maybe things are much better now but I never bothered to check and probably never will.
Slashdot Mirror
Why should they eat a humble pie? Were they spared when they did this? They were taken to court, lost and forced to comply. Why should they allow their competitors a free pass if they are not allowed a free pass?
Yes Microsoft has been using undocumented APIs and they have been taken to court over this and lost. Then they were forced to pay and comply. Same should happen to Google.
Also note that MS is not asking Google to create YouTube app. They are asking to not be banned from using the APIs (it is not even about documentation). If we need to follow the Office analogy it would be like releasing the Office document formats (which Microsoft has done).
Every WP user already knows that and it has been discussed multiple times in the WP forums and websites. There are third party apps for youtube that do not have as much functionality (because of the APIs) and often break when Google change something on YouTube. The only news here is that MS have its own (unreleased) app that is waiting for Google's permission to launch and that Google are officially denying them access to the APIs.
And then Google can ban the MS Android from accessing the YouTube APIs. What's your point?
You got it wrong. MS does not want Google to develop a YouTube app for WP. They want Google to stop blocking them from releasing a YouTube app. In some (not specified) way Google are restricting access to the APIs for WP. They may be banning the user agent, or not issuing API tokens or simply threatening Microsoft with legal action if they release an YouTube app. In any way MS does not ask Google to do anything except stop blocking them explicitly.
First of all the mobile version of youtube works on the standards-compliant browser on the Windows Phone.
Second
There's no monopoly
Are you serious? YouTube is not a monopoly? Really?
No. They should sue Google and make them pay up and comply like they were sued and forced to pay and comply.
Standards have nothing to do here. There are APIs that Google hides from the competition and uses to strengthen its own OS. If you are looking for analogy it is not MS's use of non-standard whatever. The right analogy is Internet Explorer using undocumented Windows APIs to gain advantage over Netscape or Microsoft not releasing documentation for server (Exchange if I recall correctly) software and thus preventing other companies for developing competing clients. Standards or non-standards it doesn't matter. All that matters here is that WP devices are not given access to the APIs while Android and iOS devices are.
Also all this only matters when the product in question is in a monopoly market position. WP can have all the special MS only stuff it wants as it is obvious that locking something out of WP would not influence the market. However YouTube is in a monopoly position and denying access to its APIs can certainly provide unfair advantage to Android.
Yeah Google does not allow Microsoft client access to their APIs because they are afraid MS can extend them... from the client.
And this is exactly why they need $65K to port it
That's up to the people with $65K to decide. The effort of the devs is not wasted because they are paid to do it.
Yeah and then they would not let it into the store as comments above suggest :)
Who do you mean by "we"? Because $65K do not agree with you.
Because of the freedom right? We should outbid the people who are willing to pay for the Win8/WP port and make them free by denying them free software.
Many people may not like the Don't-call-it-Metro UI but here are $65K that like it.
There is zero chance that MS will not improve it. They are desperate for apps and they approve total crap. They will not ban a quality app. Also the music player has nothing to do with selling music. The player is not related to the files you get from their service.
Bullshit. MS killed this product because everyone hated switching from Expression to VS and back. People just wanted the Expression features in VS. This is great news for everyone who ever used Expression. Also note that MS cannot just drop the features. After all there should be some way to develop pretty UI interfaces on MS platforms.
/. makes this sound like a bad news but the devs who used expression (including the team I work on) view this as really positive move. While Expression Blend/Web/etc. was not a bad product everyone was frustrated that they needed to switch between Expression Whatever and Visual Studio. Everyone just wished features were part of VS as they are supposed to be now. This is not abandoning the tools this is improving the tools. Also this would never meant to compete with Adobe. Expression were tools to create UI for MS dev tools (XAML and Web) and did not include anything like Photoshop. Saying that Expression aimed to compete with Adobe is plain wrong.
Also it is interesting how /. gives negative spin on this move that is considered positive by devs who use the tools. We're doing XAML development and using Blend and our team was quite happy to hear the news. None of us ever liked that Blend (or Expression Web for that matter) features were separate from VS UI designer.
Source? Wikipedia has nothing to say about this and it would be very strange if MS bought a tool from another company to be used with the language they just created (XAML).
It is far fetched to say it is alternative to Adobe. For starters it does not provide an alternative to Photoshop. If you don't provide an alternative to Photoshop how can you provide alternative to Adobe CS? Expression has always been a tool for designing UIs for dev platforms MS supports (i.e. XAML and Web). It was never meant to compete with Adobe head to head. Expression was supposed to be the tool designers would use when working on a project with developers who use MS tools. It ended up being something that takes people out of Visual Studio and while it was relatively good everyone (including designers) was annoyed that the features were not part of VS to begin with.
I like the Blend products' features but I never understood why they were not part of Visual Studio. I've always been frustrated having to switch between the two environments. I consider merging Blend with VS a great step forward.
May be but why should I care. I already own Office 2010 and the 100 EUR price for family pack is low enough that I'll just upgrade if 2010 does not work for me anymore. BTW does LibreOffice have live preview (you just point some formatting option from the menu and it changes the layout on the fly)? I love this feature.
This happened before LibreOffice. I did not use anything too advanced but when I used Draw and Writer at the same time something crashed bad :) I don't even want to think about Base.
When I did this (late 2010) Open Office had some weird undo behavior when you had pictures in the document. You would do something like increase a font which would move pictures to new pages. Say you don't like it you press undo but things won't return to the previous state. It turns out that pictures had some kind of anchor or something that would not be affected by undo. Office 2010 was coming out and it had that killer live preview feature. On one side I had Open Office that could not do proper undo and on the other I had MS Office that could change formatting and undo it just by moving the cursor through the menu. In addition Open Office crashed when I had more than one OO program open. I wanted to work with Writer and Draw at the same time but it seems like a shared component or something caused them to crash.
Maybe things are much better now but I never bothered to check and probably never will.