What Google's been saying from 3 years while dragging it's feet is that Windows Phone does not have enough users to make an app for, but now their claim is that so many people are using the Microsoft Youtube App for Windows Phone that it's hurting the content creators. Huh? Why can't they monetize them by making an app and show twice as many ads in it just to spite WP users? No, they won't. They want to disadvantage Windows Phone compared to Android. Vimeo has had a Windows Phone app from a long time, and Google' can't afford to make one? And you believe them?
Why don't they come out with the real reason then, like Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, Skype, do about closing down things and eat up the bad press? Why beat around the bush and play delay tactics and hide behind facts? Oh, they want to protect their clean image of being "open" and "do no evil". This is a ploy by Microsoft to force Google to tell the public exactly why they refuse to make a Youtube app and even ban Microsoft from doing so.
How can Windows Phone have so few users that use YouTube that it's not worth monetizing and have so many users that use Microsoft's new app that it's hurting Google and content creator revenue? Why not agree to allow MS to show Google ads and make money since they don't have to spend the money to create the app but can take the profits?
Ugh, and someone else states that XMPP will be disabled for users who chose to upgrade to hangouts.
Why this utter confusion over a simple thing after a whole three hour keynote yesterday and today no one seems to have a clue? Communication fail, if you ask me.
Color me skeptical, but there was similar confusion when SMS search stopped working suddenly,and then people realized Google killed it. XMPP support may stay, but I am not going to bet more than 2 bucks on it.
The company with half the top Phds and best engineers in the world and billions in profit every quarter is unable to create an open extension to XMPP to accomplish those and fallback gracefully if it's not supported? You really believe that?
You could assemble a team of 30 random HN posters and they would be able to do that.
So, I think they could do it, if and only if they wanted to. But they didn't and they themselves said it was because they didn't want to be open.
The hypothesized "video chat" protocol extension to XMPP already exists and it's called Jingle. FOSS client support isn't great, but it is progressing. So if this service isn't open to FOSS clients, that's more an issue of strategy than resources. (And indeed, the decision might change in future and be attributed to improved FOSS client performance.) If the service is indeed closed, however, they probably ought to update this page:
Google PR on the other hand, is extremely good, they have lots of people believing they're all about "do no evil" and "open" while laughing all the way to the bank.
Great, another .NET is dying post voted up on HN. Didn't we have one of those just this morning?
Meanwhile, in the real world, Microsoft posted these earnings:
"Server & Tools business reported $5.04 billion of revenue, up 11% from last year"
Inspite of competing products like Linux, Apache, Eclipse, Ruby, Java being given away for free, people are willing to pay for Windows Server, Visual Studio and IIS.
Does anyone have real data related to ".NET is dying" other than idle conjecture, short sighted "frog in the well" anectodes which sound like they're written and voted up by people sipping on a latte on a Macbook in a Starbucks in Silicon Valley?
Like the number of jobs posted? They seem to increasing every day.
Sigh, some people here just love these '.NET is dying' posts, perhaps some with a vested interest to scare startups from using it.
Again, any hard data will be appreciated that shows .NET is dying instead of the same paragraph upon paragraph of opinion and no links, references or data, we have enough HN comments of that already.
So, yes, most microsoft products are incredibly damaging for a startup.
Not every startup has to work with the small amount YC hands out. I know of a fair amount of startups using an MS stack, and they are doing very well. Of course, they are not SV cool, but they are making good money. You should sit back and analyze what you just said, because it is a pretty strange point to make.
My current company uses extensively .NET and I have almost a decade of experience working with it at my last employer, where I was also responsible for choosing and buying such products.
In my last employer (government), we didn't choose .NET, microsoft won the contracts. In the last update when I still worked there, we spent 250k USD to update our programmers VS to 2010 + windows 7. (I wonder if they will now update again). SQL Server prices are similar to oracle's with similar features.
In my startup (not a startup anymore) I had to spend 40k just to get the environment needed for a project (involving telephony) the only reason we had to use .NET was because the hardware manufacturer only provided driver+tooling for windows and some components were exclusively for .NET. Because we mostly use linux and macs, we also had to buy windows licenses. In my country, a Windows 8 license cost almost 2x the minimum wage.
We happened to have a discussion if we should give up or not a specific product because of the microsoft taxation on our business. The only reason we decided to keep using .NET is the cheap labor and the lack of hardware suppliers willing to provide us drivers and tools for linux.
So yes, microsoft damages not only startups, but companies in general.
I don't know much about IBM products but I'm a heavy Oracle DB user in the process of migrating to Postgres due to simple problems, cost not being one of them. In fact, you will see a lot of users still using very old Oracle versions and getting full support from oracle.
(a) The money YC is giving isn't intended to solve capex problems like this. It's meant to make the first couple months of getting a minimal offering viable for small early teams. In the YC model, if the problem your business solves involves significant capex costs, you use YC to match your company with a next round of investors to handle that problem.
(b) The reality is that you do get enough money to fund a .NET stack when you get into YC, because YC comes with an assurance of immediate follow-on convertible note investment.
Neither of these two points makes .NET a better choice for early-stage startups than Rails or Django or PHP; Microsoft has to smooth over the expense problem with programs like Bizspark.
Somehow I doubt anyone really joins a programme like YC's for the money.
In any case, if you want to work with the best tools, sometimes you have to pay a premium to get them. That's either damaging to people who can't/won't pay the money or it's an advantage for those with enough confidence in what they're doing to make the investment, depending on which side of the line you're on.
>This is the same selling scheme used by drug dealers.
Would you hold Google to the same standard and say that's true of their free Google Apps for education and how they use free email to sign you into Google.com so they can track you across different PCs?
If not, cool. But if so, would be good to be clear. You've suddenly become very active with what I'd consider an overly Microsoft approach (looking at your comments from the past few hours).
Not sure if that is a prime example, since StackOverflow was built with the wealthy businessman Joel Spolsky as a primary backer. That doesn't diminish anything they accomplished, it just means that they didn't do it without access to sufficient resources.
At Stack Overflow we ran on Bizpark til sometime in 2012, it really is a very nice program (everyone seems to forget that you keep the licenses you get, it's not like you have to re-buy everything when you graduate).
While I suppose in theory Joel could have thrown a lot of money away just because it didn't happen that way. Stack Overflow was running on it's own income until the first round of funding ( http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/05/announcing-our-series-... ), excepting the pre-launch period (everyone might have just taken equity then, I don't know I wasn't around until just before the series A). I think it was mostly ad income, though Careers ( http://careers.stackoverflow.com/ ) was around fairly early too.
No matter how disciplined Spolsky was with the funds, nothing's ever the same if you know that you have the option to just inject a bunch of money into one of your projects should the need arise (and of course, SO had another non-cash leg up: the blogs of Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky as major marketing avenues, i.e., the instant attention of large swaths of the developer workforce). If you don't have that option, regardless of if it's used or not, you play by different rules.
Stack Exchange is cool and everything, but it didn't have the same difficulties that face most bootstrapped startups.
>"Server & Tools business reported $5.04 billion of revenue, up 11% from last year"
So, they made in a year something around what Apple makes every quarter just from iPad sales? That's the rosy sign MS's "Servers and Tools" business is doing OK?
>So, they made in a year something around what Apple makes every quarter just from iPad sales? That's the rosy sign MS's "Servers and Tools" business is doing OK?
That's their server and tools revenue in a quarter, not a year. In your rush to compare it with an irrelevant and totally unrelated figure you've taken leave of facts and reality.
Why not compare the yearly figure now with how much Exxon makes by selling gas and then conclude the Server and Tools division is not doing okay? I mean that's what you want to conclude right?
>That's their server and tools revenue in a quarter, not a year. In your rush to compare it with an irrelevant and totally unrelated figure you've taken leave of facts and reality.
Haven't taken out any facts -- the parent poster (you?) didn't add it was a quarter result in the first place. And the "X% up from last year" didn't help.
That said, it's totally unrelated only in that the end product sold is different. People still compare companies based on their revenue all the time -- including totally different beasts such as IBM and MS, or, indeed, Exxon and Apple. If you want to measure relative strength it's quite insightful.
>Why not compare the yearly figure now with how much Exxon makes by selling gas and then conclude the Server and Tools division is not doing okay? I mean that's what you want to conclude right?
No, I want to conclude that MS, and their enterprise sales specifically, which was once the huge behemoth of the computing industry, makes a not that impressive revenue compared to other players.
It might even be their best revenue ever. It still is worse compared to what they made vs what other companies made a decade or so ago.
In other words, the point I tried to make, maybe unsuccessfully, is that they might be billionaires, and they even might more than ever, but whereas once they used to own the town, now there are several other billionaires around, including some multi-billionaires.
Okay, I agree, Apple and Google rock and Microsoft sucks.
So how is all that related to the article idea's and the OPs point about the FUD on HN about .NET dying? Is .NET dying because Apple makes more money selling iDevices than Microsoft's Dev tools?
Lets be upfront here about the topic being discussed, is it "Where is .NET headed?" or is it "Does MS make less money than its competitors and therefore sucks?"
>Lets be upfront here about the topic being discussed, is it "Where is .NET headed?" or is it "Does MS make less money than its competitors and therefore sucks?"
It's not about sucking or not. It's about if it's as a big player as it used to be, or if the wind got sucked out of it's wings, and now is on decline mode.
Nobody said anything about "sucking" or that it will die financially tomorrow. It might still be around 2 centuries later.
Quite a few people are locked into that toolchain and don't have a choice but to continue buying what Microsoft is selling.
And I think that is one of the main reasons that many .NET developers who are a little bit familiar with open source and non-Microsoft technologies are starting to wonder if its worthwhile paying all of that money to have Microsoft make all of those architectural decisions for them.
Just start with the name, ".NET". What were they referencing there? The network. The web. Especially if you interpret that to mean the web, which I think it really is referring to, you have to ask yourself, is Microsoft or ANY one particular company really leading the way on the web? I think the answer is no. The leaders may be employed by some particular companies like Google, but they are mainly organizing projects on their own through things like github.
They chose that name for a reason. They knew if they wanted to stay relevant, they needed to focus on the web.
Does web development need Microsoft? Ask the average web developer. Personally, I don't think I can ever forgive them for what they have done (and continue to do) to Internet Explorer.
Does Microsoft need web development? Actually they are opposing forces when it comes right down to it. Microsoft makes too many billions of dollars through Windows-related products to really push the web platform forward. So they have actively been working to impede it by pushing out incompatible and underpowered browsers.
Can Microsoft's traditional licensing revenue streams survive a real conversion to open-source? LOL.
The cost of the MS tool-chain is basically a rounding error on internal software projects. An enterprise MSDN subscription is a under 1% of my billable rate for the year and servers are ridiculously cheap even when paying for the windows stack. Now sure plenty of FOSS toolchain can work wonders, but when building small internal sites and compared to the Java stack we are simply far more effective.
PS: I have seen it both ways, Java redeveloped in .Net and .Net redeveloped in Java. Generally things where better in the .Net world. I spent years as a Java developer and find the idea of going back is horrifying.
Those numbers don't necessarily mean anyone is making a conscious decision to buy in. they could simply mean the installed base needs 11% more server licensing by dollar to scale/maintain their existing solutions.
So there are all these customers that hate the Microsoft toolchain and also know they are getting shafted by Microsoft.
In fact the customers hate Microsoft so much they decided to pay Microsoft an extra 11% bonus this year (and will probably pay another 11% bonus next year), even though they have all these free toolchain alternatives that they could be using.
Considering people have close to zero control over how Microsoft licenses, say, SQL Server? Yes.
And I never said they hated MS. I just said that increased revenue doesn't necessarily mean anyone is consciously buying in. Upgrading the old Exchange Server and adding another Domain Controller makes MS more money but for the IT department, the decision is simply "keep what we have under support and updated".
If you want to gauge how happy IT is with MS, you need to look at what they're choosing for brand new projects.
My anecdotal experience is that (happily or not) MS shops continue to choose MS. And small shops that couldn't afford MS anyway continue to not choose MS.
I don't know if that's a valid extrapolation. I, for one, in all my working years have never met a Linux company that was interested in switching to .NET, but I met many that wanted it the other way around if they could only justify the upfront investment to convert the proprietary application stack.
With cross-platform compatibility, specifically mobile compatibility [on platforms people actually use, i.e., not Windows Phone], being a major sticking point, .NET is becoming less and less desirable on the surface level.
Microsoft is just like Oracle. Big fancy businessmen who know nothing about development automatically buy into the MS stack just because it's a big name and the labor is easy to retain. Hardly any technical considerations go into it, and then they're upset when they [eventually] learn that the end result won't work with the iPad.
What about the alternate explanation that Windows Server is growing because demand for the products that already use Microsoft's stack is growing, despite the stack itself? What about the explanation that people are buying more server licenses than they used to due to increasingly widespread virtualization deployments? Whereas people used to buy relative big metal and run one OS on it, now people are taking that hardware and deploying many small VMs across it, each requiring its own license?
There are plenty of interpretations of that data that aren't "people are flocking to .NET".
I suspect all your alternate explanations as to why the server division is growing are true. The server divison is doing extremely well.
My point is I doubt very much the server division would be doing as well as it is if the Op was correct in saying people are locked into that toolchain.
Because that would suggest a lot of people would be unhappy with that situation (i.e. meaning bad press, bad word of mouth, bad for business) and many of those would also be trying desperately to leave that toolchain and succeeding (i.e. reduced sales).
I disagree. I don't think that people have to excite a lot of negative press or otherwise make a fuss with something just because they're moderately displeased with it. Most people won't go to the effort unless the tools are egregiously bad, and we know that Microsoft's stack isn't. They can still be quietly unhappy, locked into the platform with hundreds of thousands of man-hours invested into proprietary applications that depend heavily on major, hard-to-replace platform components (see: WPF, not implemented by Mono, or Silverlight, hit and miss via the unmaintained Moonlight), and buying server licenses due to a change in the way servers are provisioned.
Moving away from .NET is a long-term proposition, and it's an expense that few companies can justify no matter how much they dislike the platform. I believe you are claiming far too much credit for MS based off of a single growth figure.
> They can still be quietly unhappy, locked into the platform with hundreds of thousands of man-hours invested into proprietary applications that depend heavily on major, hard-to-replace platform components (see: WPF, not implemented by Mono, or Silverlight, hit and miss via the unmaintained Moonlight), and buying server licenses due to a change in the way change in the way servers are provisioned.
What change in the way servers are provisioned? Many companies still use Windows Server 2003 and even .NET 4.5 is supported on it. That sounds like FUD.
>They can still be quietly unhappy, locked into the platform with hundreds of thousands of man-hours invested into proprietary applications
They can also be happy with the ease of use of Active Directory and Group Policy instead of relying on half baked convulted perl scripts cooked up by a long gone sysadmin. Please, you're just embarassing yourself with your ignorant assumptions.
>What change in the way servers are provisioned? Many companies still use Windows Server 2003 and even .NET 4.5 is supported on it. That sounds like FUD.
I explained this in my initial post in this thread. Virtual machines are having a major effect on the provisioning of servers, requiring more OS licenses than prior. The person I replied to conceded this point.
>They can also be happy with the ease of use of Active Directory and Group Policy instead of relying on half baked convulted perl scripts cooked up by a long gone sysadmin.
LDAP
>Please, you're just embarassing yourself with your ignorant assumptions.
You weren't capable of processing my first post, and are now harassing me for discussing Microsoft in a MS thread, so who should be the embarrassed one here?
>I don't know if that's a valid extrapolation. I, for one, in all my working years have never met a Linux company that was interested in switching to .NET, but I met many that wanted it the other way around if they could only justify the upfront investment to convert the proprietary application stack.
Thanks for doing exactly what the OP requested commenters NOT to do.
From the OP post:
"Does anyone have real data related to ".NET is dying" other than idle conjecture, short sighted "frog in the well" anectodes which sound like they're written and voted up by people sipping on a latte on a Macbook in a Starbucks in Silicon Valley?
Again, any hard data will be appreciated that shows .NET is dying instead of the same paragraph upon paragraph of opinion and no links, references or data, we have enough HN comments of that already."
The world is much much much bigger than what you saw in all your working years. That's why personal anecdotes are quite worthless and we need real numbers.
So many paragraphs of speculation and no links or references from people living in their own little bubble and mistaking it for the world.
>Thanks for doing exactly what the OP requested commenters NOT to do.
I countered jussij's perspective, equally posted without "links or references" (which don't necessarily make something valid, fyi), with my own. I didn't reply to the parent post that said "please don't say anything mean about .NET unless you can prove it". That poster is not the internet police, we are free to continue to speculate and navel-gaze and counter-navel-gaze despite his or her statement.
>I countered jussij's perspective, equally posted without "links or references"
No, he posted a publicly verifiable figure which is audited by the SEC and punishable with heavy penalties for faking, 11% increase of revenue in the quarter, up from last years quarter, whereas you continue the trend of the thousand other HN comments which say .NET is dying because they personally don't know of a company using it. How many companies do you know? How many companies exist in the US? Keep up the navel gazing. Your other posts also are idle speculation hopelessly stuck in your own bubble and your post is not very different from line noise at this point.
He posted his interpretation of a cherry-picked accounting figure. I told him why that interpretation may not be valid. It's a fair discussion point.
>Keep up the navel gazing.
Thanks, I will. I enjoy sharing opinions and interpretations and getting feedback on these. I don't find discussion fora where all of our posts need bibliographies very exciting in general.
>I, for one, in all my working years have never met a Linux company that was interested in switching to .NET, but I met many that wanted it the other way around if they could only justify the upfront investment to convert the proprietary application stack.
So, .NET is dying because quite a few people are locked into it? Sounds like you got it backwards.
And the red herrings about the name .NET don't make any sense except if you look from the context of the prevalent buzzwords and jargon at the end of 90s. Like, say "dotcom".
Because HN readers are too young to remember the days without open source, where you needed to pay for the tooling, and think Microsoft is the only commercial vendor of developer tools.
So now it isn't just Microsoft posts that are getting flagged, but everything not Google? Give me a break, that will absolutely get your flagging privileges revoked, and quickly.
Does it really surprise you that Google is receiving large amounts of exposure today? Really?
Edit: Apologies, I assumed your intentions poorly.
"Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful."
Last time when Google was intentionally blocking Google maps and then deprecated ActiveSync on Windows Phone someone suggested Google should updated it to the following:(which seems quite true given how much of the world's crowdsourced video content is on YouTube):
"Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful, except on Windows Phone".
Also, I see this post being flagged a lot, stay classy, Google fans on HN.
I imagine that there is a great deal of YouTube content which Google is obligated to revenue share advertising money on (Vevo music videos, among other content) -- Google can't fulfill those obligations if those videos are showing up on WinMo without ads.
Today's remarks about XMPP interop from Page really bother me. In the late 90s, Microsoft was the vendor that wanted interop/federation (on MSN) and nobody took them up on it either.
>Google can't fulfill those obligations if those videos are showing up on WinMo without ads.
The mobile YouTube site that Google serves to Windows Phone devices does not display any ads. Therefore an ad-free app for WP does nothing to change the situation that WP users don't see ads on YouTube.
Now, it is possible that some of Google's content is licensed in such a way that only their mobile site is exempt from displaying ads while any native apps are not. However, a C&D hardly seems like the proper course of action here, given that Microsoft says they are willing to display Google's ads.
The mobile YouTube site that Google serves to Windows Phone devices presumably doesn't play videos that are marked as unavailable on mobile, whereas Microsoft's app apparently ignores that flag and plays them anyway.
Google is the new Microsoft. All this "Don't do evil" bullshit is just another illusion to sell more ads. That's all Google has ever been and ever will be. A fucking Ad company. Over 97% of their revenues prove that. If they can't plaster ads on your shit and sell your data, expect a nice big blue, red, yellow and green fuck you.
The ranking in the front page is affected by flagging. Usually, the more points a post has and the more recent it is, the higher it is ranked. But flagging pushes it down. So if you see a 100 point post submitted 10 hours ago above a 150 point post submitted 6 hours ago, it means that the 150 point post got flagged a lot.
Also, I see this post being flagged a lot, stay classy, Google fans on HN.
Or, perhaps there are those of us who see the ensuing flame war on this particular stream of non-ending google vs microsoft cage match flame wars and don't want to see them any more.
I find it particularly interesting when people complain about the ActiveSync thing. Did you know that Microsoft patented it, and Google has to pay a license for each user? I can entirely understand why they block it from Microsoft devices if they are also forced to pay a license for them.
I don't have an issue with them pulling it, but they did it suddenly and gave MS very less time for a workaround and increased the time only after public shaming.
MS implemented CardDAV and CalDAV standards as Google wanted, and as part of spring cleaning round 2, those are deprecated and replaced with their own proprietary new API!
> MS implemented CardDAV and CalDAV standards as Google wanted
Not in any released product, they haven't. The update is expected "later this summer"[1] and, as you certainly know, CalDAV isn't being deprecated or replaced, you just need to get whitelisted to access it. They could certainly use that to shut out Microsoft, but there's been no indication that that's been done, and we would certainly have heard a leak about it by now if they had been...
I doubt it was suddenly, though of course I am just spinning conjecture: What I imagined happened is that Google told Microsoft that it's kind of ridiculous that they have to pay an ActiveSync license for Microsoft devices (which could have used other APIs...but wouldn't you know it Microsoft chose the one that made them even more money), some negotiating happened, Microsoft said stuff it, so Google pulled ActiveSync. It is truly a ridiculous situation that Google has to pay Microsoft to provide services to Microsoft users.
I'm no Google apologist (Page's statements about lets all work together etc were utterly ridiculous. I understand that he probably actually believes what he was saying, not realizing the destruction they lay in their wake), but Microsoft almost always has a nasty stink coming off of their complaints.
How do they update the app if Google doesn't give them access to the API? They need to kill it and millions of Windows Phone users will be left with no legal YouTube app.
Also, if you're referring to the comments on WPCentral, of course, it's "Windows Phone Central" where obviously fans and users of Windows Phone who got frustrated for years with the lack of a quality YouTube app on their phone hang out.
That's not Google's problem. What law says that Google needs to provide an API? This is just embarrassing for Microsoft. Basically google doesn't think it's worth spending the time developing an app for Windows Phone, and Microsoft then tries to hack it together by themselves, illegally.
I haven't ported any of my own apps to Win Phone either - what's the point when nobody is using it? Out of 60,000 visits to our site over a given period, 4000 are iOS, 2000 Android, 50 blackberry and 20 Windows Phone. We haven't bothered with blackberry either (apart from providing an html5 version).
Face it Microsoft: Windows Phone is a dismal failure.
>Face it Microsoft: Windows Phone is a dismal failure.
So did a smart guy say once about Apple. I went from being a hardcore Android fan to just falling in love with my Lumia phone. Everyone I know who has a windows phone has been happy with it. So no I don't think it is a dismal failure.
I have found replacements for most Google services but there doesn't exist or may never exist one for Youtube. I was a user of Youtube before Google was a buyer, so yes it sucks to be given a second class treatment because you made the unpopular choice for your phone. Hope this doesn't repeat, you know with Ubuntu and Firefox phones coming out.
Who ever did is either eating crow for that, or isn't as smart as he claimed.
Microsoft has been in the mobile business for a long time. They have tried to re-invent their offerings at least two times, probably more. There are a lot of OEMs with knives in their backs (e.g.: Sendo, OQO) in the wake.
That they have failed to succeed after blowing such a lead and countless investment dollars is a real organizational character failure on their part. That some in Redmond think they're still winning is even sadder.
Windows Phone is seeing decent numbers, 6 million in the last quarters. The lack of apps like YouTube and Instagram is hurting the platform and they're showing they're serious about fixing that issuee by picking a fight with Google.
You don't get market share overnight when your platform has 100x less apps.
On the same note devs don't want to write apps for WP because it has no market share.
No, whether people like it or not is also part of the point. If you like a product, you are more likely to recommend it to someone, and word of mouth does wonders for adoption. If the actual count for adoption of Windows phone had been going down, then the statement about its failure can be taken into consideration, but its quiet the opposite, it has been rising steadily.
Try finding the Walmart exclusive windows phone Lumia 521 which came about a week ago, you can't, its selling like hot pancakes all across America. Its only a matter of time till Windows Phone becomes a real competitor and the reason why Google is worried.
Uh, when did YouTube get a monopoly on streaming video? Did they force browser manufacturers to display youtube videos only, under penalty of losing access to all other Google sites?
Antitrust is a serious matter, let's not trivialize it.
You don't need a monopoly, just market power. And how the market is defined can be an interesting issue on its own, so I imagine it would be conceivable that YouTube _would_ be found to have a monopoly on "community contributed videos", or something along those lines. Google is obviously trying to leverage YouTube to hurt a competitor's phone ecosystem, so this hardly seems far-fetched.
Well, then, Microsoft is more then welcome to make that claim and go to court, and if the court eventually finds that Google indeed does have such a monopoly - well, then they will be subject to antitrust rules.
Until a court says otherwise, nothing compels Google thus.
Just remember that according to the courts, Google doesn't even have a monopoly on search. It is far fetched that they have a monopoly on "community contributed videos", if that's even a market sector that would be considered for antitrust.
Hell, Google doesn't even allow a significant portion of the online video market to participate on Youtube. They are anything but choking out competition; they are handing their competition a huge feature on a silver platter.
>I haven't ported any of my own apps to Win Phone either - what's the point when nobody is using it?
So Google's complaint is that "nobody" is using the Windows Phone Youtube app and that this is hurting Youtube because "nobody" is watching so many ad-less videos on Youtube that it's robbing Youtube and content creators of all the "no money" gotten from no ad views in the app which used by nobody? Oh, and did I mention nobody can use the Windows Phone Youtube app because nobody is using Windows Phone?!
Google's complaint isn't that "nobody" is using WP, so stop bringing out that strawman to make yourself sound smart.
Google's argument is simply that Microsoft, a company that should know better, is intentionally breaking the Youtube ToS. The lack of native app is because Google has determined that WP users can "live with" watching videos in the browser for the time being.
> How do they update the app if Google doesn't give them
> access to the API? They need to kill it and millions of
> Windows Phone users will be left with no legal YouTube app.
One possible alternative is for Microsoft to release a version of their app that does not violate the YouTube TOS. For example, it wouldn't play videos that the uploader has flagged as being forbidden to mobile devices and wouldn't permit downloading of videos.
There is a public YouTube API, documented at https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/ , which Microsoft could have used if they were interested in implementing a TOS-compliant app.
To my knowledge the YouTube API doesn't ban users for excessive use of the API, it just throttles them temporarily.
The exact throttling values are not posted publicly, but there are multiple third-party apps using the YouTube APIs successfully, so I expect the limits are high enough for a standard client to work without problems.
Looks like the Google fans, employees and shareholders on HN with good karma can't let this story break on the day of Google I/O? And people accuse Microsoft of astroturfing! What is this then?
If PG does not want to stop this blatant and continuous moderator abuse, he might as well declare HN a Google and Linux fiefdom so that the rest of us using other platforms and who can think for ourselves and are not Microsoft haters can stay away.
]]]
Posted this story earlier and it got flagged off the front page.
This is the latest in a long saga.
From a post from Microsoft in 2011:
First, in 2006 Google acquired YouTube—and since then it has put in place a growing number of technical measures to restrict competing search engines from properly accessing it for their search results. Without proper access to YouTube, Bing and other search engines cannot stand with Google on an equal footing in returning search results with links to YouTube videos and that, of course, drives more users away from competitors and to Google.
Second, in 2010 and again more recently, Google blocked Microsoft’s new Windows Phones from operating properly with YouTube. Google has enabled its own Android phones to access YouTube so that users can search for video categories, find favorites, see ratings, and so forth in the rich user interfaces offered by those phones. It’s done the same thing for the iPhones offered by Apple, which doesn’t offer a competing search service.
Unfortunately, Google has refused to allow Microsoft’s new Windows Phones to access this YouTube metadata in the same way that Android phones and iPhones do. As a result, Microsoft’s YouTube “app” on Windows Phones is basically just a browser displaying YouTube’s mobile Web site, without the rich functionality offered on competing phones. Microsoft is ready to release a high quality YouTube app for Windows Phone. We just need permission to access YouTube in the way that other phones already do, permission Google has refused to provide.
Twitter and Facebook can do and have done the same thing to other 3rd party developers, too.
This like saying Google is not on equal footing with Bing on social media integration, because it doesn't get the type of API level that Bing gets from Facebook.
Does Google want to "maliciously" block Youtube from WP8? Yes. Does Facebook maliciously block Google from getting any of their deeper level API's? Yes.
So now can we also stop pretending Google owes anything to Microsoft? I wish the situation for all platforms was different, too, and there was a lot more collaboration between them. But I also understand why Google is doing this. It's retaliation for all the crap Microsoft has done against Google over the past few years, too - the anti-trust lawsuit, the Gmail ad, the DroidRage, the Scroogle, the patent license extortion from Android (and Chromebook) makers, and on and on.
So I can't exactly say I feel sorry for Microsoft, because they are not innocent, even though they try to play it like that in the media. But this situation will become worse for any user that isn't fully committed to one platform or another, and that's just the unfortunate reality of the tech war today. Maybe it will get better in a few years.
At least with the Microsoft monopoly you could reverse engineer their software. What is happening with the web is much worse.
Additional copy & pasted rant:
"You can reverse engineer binary applications but you cannot reverse engineer the cloud. When Google deprecates a web service, Facebook eliminates an API, or Twitter imposes tougher API restrictions, all dependant services fall like dominoes. The weakest link in the chain is the cloud services that you can’t run or port anywhere: we no longer have control over the applications we use.
On the other hand if you want to run old applications from the Apple II, downloading an emulator solves the problem. Do you miss Borland Turbo Pascal 5.5? Install DOS on your i7 or run it in a virtual machine to achieve instantaneous happiness. Just don’t expect to take advantage of your quad core! Emulators are not created in a vacuum and reverse engineering is the key to emulating a complete platform. Reverse engineering is also very important to tackle complex issues in hardware and software virtualization. For example, you need reverse engineering skills to virtualize Internet Explorer 6 on Windows 7.
It seems odd now that Microsoft was prosecuted for engaging in monopolistic practices in the 90s. Apple and Google are currently abusing their market positions without much real criticism. Microsoft must be laughing because these new companies have launched platforms far more controlled than Microsoft’s in the 90s. Ironically, Microsoft is now doing the same thing with their mobile initiatives and Windows, which would have been illegal 20 years ago. All of the above practices are contrary to the hacker spirit."
"It seems odd now that Microsoft was prosecuted for engaging in monopolistic practices in the 90s. Apple and Google are currently abusing their market positions without much real criticism."
Key, and very important points:
First - Microsoft really did have a, legally proven, Monopoly position in 1999 for desktop/laptop computing. It's hard for some of us to remember, particularly with the wealth of web-based computing in which the client really doesn't matter any more (Facebook works just fine from a Mac or Linux System) - not to mention the incredible growth of mobile (in which Microsoft has no traction). But in 1999, Microsoft had basically a monopoly role in the people's computing experience, and they then tried to leverage that monopoly to take over another market (web browsing) . They managed to squish Netscape like a little bug, but the Justice Department stepped in, and prevented them from continuing their illegal behavior [1].
Apple has a nice product, but they most certainly do not have a Monopoly.
I agree that Microsoft had a legally proven monopoly but Google is moving so fast that laws are light-years behind.
What we watched today at Google I/O was really impressive. Not from the technology side but from the business/velocity/applied-research perspective. I don't want to stop that kind of innovation but leave space to a more healthy web (APIs).
"They managed to squish Netscape like a little bug"
How many "little bugs" has Google squished with their Search? Granted they didn't get sued by DOJ because they were smarter (Google's Lobbying Budget: $25 Million During FTC Probe - http://thenextweb.com/google/2013/01/04/google-spend-25-mill... ) than Microsoft but with a 70% online market share they can destroy virtually any business or niche they want to.
All the extra stuff you see on Google Search now was done by other companies and most were destroyed during Search updates for having "spammy and shallow content." If you ask Google why the clutter? The answer is something like "Because users love that content...blah blah" But users hated it when others did it and Google didn't make money on it. Of course.
Google haven't squashed nearly enough little bugs. Google search results are still full of crappy vertical search engines and other zero-value content whose entire business model is based on them getting in the way of finding the information I actually want.
Every time I search for reviews of a laptop, say, I get page after page of autogenerated sites that have not one iota of content to call their own, but still manage to rank highly for "<model> reviews". They're the main ones that have been yelling about Google screwing them.
The ease with which people can share files, thus giving copyright laws a big middle finger, might have had a part in encouraging software design to be placed behind an API gate and into the cloud.
"You can reverse engineer binary applications but you cannot reverse engineer the cloud."
Umm, yes you can. It's all series of HTTP calls. Problem is not with reverse engineering, it's getting people to use your new reverse-engineered service with zero other users to provide content. You can reverse engineer Youtube and have all its features and API, you just don't get all the content and community in it.
No, you can't: a service that shutdowns can't be recovered, and you can't learn about the advanced Google algorithms just scraping their search engine.
One of the core ethical purposes of reverse engineering is to leave the door open for competition.
The difference is that Google bitches and moans about browser ballots in the OS, bitches and moans about Facebook not being open, but forgets all of this about YouTube.
"But I also understand why Google is doing this. It's retaliation for all the crap Microsoft has done against Google over the past few years, too - the anti-trust lawsuit, the Gmail ad, the DroidRage, the Scroogle, the patent license extortion from Android (and Chromebook) makers, and on and on."
In a number of comments on HN I get the impression that people believe Google to be a more "open" and less evil company and thus should be trusted more but here you're comparing them to other companies considered "evil" and saying it's okay for Google to behave the same way.
Also, lack of social media integration isn't that important a feature of search engines. Also it is likely that UbuntuOS/Jolla/FirefoxOS/Bada also get the same treatment from Google?
There used to be an understated, but strong implication, that Google is 'good', Microsoft is 'evil', and perhaps justifiably so: Microsoft didn't exactly make a good impression on geekdom during the 90's.
These days however, and speaking from a purely subjective perspective, Microsoft appears to be slightly softer and humbler, whilst Google under Page appears to be confident, maybe even aggressive and certainly increasingly ubiquitous. It's the last part that concerns me most.
Apple, Google and Microsoft however all pale by comparison when placed on the same scale as non-profit Mozilla Corp, in terms of openness and looking after our rights and freedoms.
Personally I'm somewhat of a bannerless citizen, but at least in theory, that's an organization that could receive my support.
I used to believe Google was more "open" and "less evil", because they were.
I no longer believe those things, because they aren't true anymore (but they did used to be true).
I still use a lot of Google products and services (gmail, Nexus 4, google maps, search, ARM Chromebook, Go, etc) because I am more pragmatic than idealist, but now I view Google as being capable of being just as dicky as any other big company when it suits them, because that's how they've been behaving for the past couple of years.
I think it is unfortunate they don't make the APIs more equally available to all platforms, but I'm not going to start a riot or boycott them over it... they are just a big business being a big business, and yes, occasionally doing "evil" (for very first-world-problem definitions of "evil").
Maemo never did. I had a N900, and one of its standard YouTube app allowed you to download videos, which seems to be one of Google's issues with the Windows Phone app. I never recall Google sending a mail to Nokia about that. Maybe nobody used Maemo? Or the fact that it did not have a kill switch?
From Google's About page:
"Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful."
Last time when Google was intentionally blocking Google maps and then deprecated ActiveSync on Windows Phone someone posted this funny line(which seems quite true given how much of the world's crowdsourced video content is on YouTube):
"Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful, except on Windows Phone".
Also, HN's post about Microsoft's reply is getting heavily flaggged as well.
"If PG does not want to stop this blatant and continuous moderator abuse, he might as well declare HN a Google and Linux fiefdom so that the rest of us using other platforms and who can think for ourselves and are not Microsoft haters can stay away."
I think an interesting project would be to reverse engineer the flag scoring and karma decay, scrape and offer an "unskewed HN" and something that shows most flagged topics or articles (maybe a flag weighted word cloud for last x days idk).
Actually, I suspect that it might mainly be the video download functionality that's made Google pissed off. They've mostly turned a blind eye to blocking ads on YouTube - there's even extensions on the Chrome Web Store specifically advertised as YouTube ad blockers - but they're really aggressive towards YouTube downloader software. (Though they're probably less willing to turn a blind eye in general when platform owners like Microsoft do it.)
But if app is not using official YouTube API, then TOS for API are not applicable for it. So in legal sense this must be equal to browser with built-in ad blocker. Except trademark problem.
(Edit: looks like that submission is getting flagged as well. I guess this story really isn't showing Google is good light if Google fans are in such heavy damage control mode. It looks like they have a veto on what appears on the HN front page. Look you may not like Microsoft and even its response but why try to bury a legitimate news item? Not enough Google I/O posts on front page? ).
"We’d be more than happy to include advertising but need Google to provide us access to the necessary APIs.
In light of Larry Page’s comments today calling for more interoperability and less negativity, we look forward to solving this matter together for our mutual customers."
I wonder what happens if Microsoft doesn't back down till they get access to the ads API, will Google file a lawsuit? Interesting times!
The issue that triggers that problem is that Google refuses to either give them access to the YouTube API like it does for iOS and Android or makes a WP app itself.
There are copyright issues involved because Microsoft needs direct raw access to the YouTube videos, this means that Microsoft can bypass the ads and other deals Google have made with their content partners. Apple and Tivo made deals with Google to be able to do this, Google has to decide if its worth it for them to make the same deal with Microsoft at this point. I personally don't think Google is being evil about it there's just a lot more involved.
You see each service in Internet has something called Terms Of Service.
In case of YouTube one of terms says that apps cannot skip ads. In other words it says that apps cannot steal from poor creators of materials.
MS created app which is doing it. They ordinary steal money from ads from creators. People spent theirs time on creating content, uploaded it to YouTube, and now WP users thanks to MS will watch theirs work in way which will cause that creators will not get money from it.
Does behavior of MS means that now anybody can download all MS products and start to use those products without paying?
So suppose i access youtube through Firefox and I have adblocker and a video download extension installed .....am I in violation of ToS?
Also, I have AppleTV and I have never seen any ad on youtube video, so are they themselves helping me to steal content from creators?
I doubt Apple would do anything without Google's permission regarding this. Google probably has the same deal with Apple with the built-in YouTube app where there weren't any ads either.
@iamshs not sure here, but I'm guessing that you are not breaking TOS.
But app for displaying YouTube content needs to be OK with TOS for YouTube API.
And this TOS says:
II. Prohibitions
Your API Client will not, and You will not encourage or create functionality for Your users or other third parties to:
[...]
modify, replace, interfere with or block advertisements placed by YouTube in the YouTube Data, YouTube audiovisual content, or the YouTube player;
@iamshs where you found info that Google forbidden MS to use YouTube API? I only read that MS said that Google didn't help them and that they don't have access to metadata. But I never found direct wording "forbidden MS to use YouTube API" or similar.
Can you share with info where somebody from MS says that Google forbidden them to use YouTube API?
Ok. Thank you for the information. So as other commentators are saying, Google did not let MS access the youtube API, so does this app still in violation of TOS rules? Interesting moves from behemoths, specially considering MS's reply.
The YouTube apps on my android devices is pretty poor (look at the comments on the play store). I usually just end up going to the website. Google is mad someone built a working app for YouTube.
My bet is on Google employees. I get a good dozen or so downvotes from them when I post something negative about Google. Usually it happens in a short period of time, as if someone gave them marching orders.
I have also noticed that Googlers aren't fans of saying "Disclaimer: I work for Google" but go straight into praising Google's Product A and Feature B as if they had no bias.
"Google is good and Microsoft is evil" is getting a little tiring and IMO is no longer true. Google will do almost anything for a quick buck:
I'd call this an opinion rather than a bias.. A bias is where some exogenous factors (e.g. background, stakes..) are pushing opinions a certain direction.
So what? People have biases, I never claimed to be unbiased and we're just sharing our opinions. I do not get paid by anyone for what I say. What I said about Google is heretic to some, only because they have this notion of an angelic Google. They'd believe it for Apple, most other companies and especially for Facebook and Microsoft.
Looking at your posts, it appears your posts has more hate than reason when it comes to Google.
That's an opinion, but I no longer fall for Google's kool aid...and yes, there's some boomerang from having drunk it earlier on.
FYI: I don't work for Google. So its not just google employees that disagree with you.
The good thing is that I am not looking to get noticed, get funded or being hired here so I truly say what's in my mind. I am 100% sure that many [insert corp name here] employees disagree with me on virtually every topic.
I think it's a natural reaction when your opinion on a subject shifts drastically towards the negative; when you've 'grown out of' an opinion it seems silly that anyone else could still hold it afterwards.
Google claimed a lot of things but generally the theme was "We're nice, ethical...trust us with monopoly power, we'll be considerate...blah blah" and people believed it, helping them get even more market share. IMO they seriously abused that power especially in the past 2-3 years, only to fatten their wallet http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2011/10/google... at the expense of websites that provide the content for Google Search. It's not merely academic, well meaning small businesses lost everything they had, and then some.
If I /we were stupid to believe that, and if "Google doesn't owe you any traffic," fine but we sure have the right to voice out our opinions.
You seem to be telling a story about someone who lost website traffic because Google changed their ranking scheme or introduced a competing product. Is this right? If so, what happened, and is that person you?
It wasn't just Google changing their rankings (to manually put their own results ahead of competitors), they were also scraping data from these competitors and displaying it as their own, which they continued to do after the FTC told them to stop.
<i> I get a good dozen or so downvotes from them when I post something negative about Google. Usually it happens in a short period of time, as if someone gave them marching orders</i>
There are thousands of employees at Google. Maybe there are just are a lot of people reading HN during the day.
Comments sometimes get downvoted because they are off-topic (fair regarding guidelines? I do not know). For instance, this is a meta discussion about HN being biased towards one company or an other, and has nothing to do with an Microsoft developed app being declared to be in violating with YouTube’s API and Terms of Service.
Are Bing's ranking algorithms open source then? Or are they too just a black box? This is ridiculous - I'm a big fan of open source but do you think it's realistic that somebody can make their ranking algorithm open source and stay relevant? There's people that would abuse it ridiculously.
Why was Microsoft evil? Because back in the day they hired only the best and brightest nerds and geeks. They had the same type of 'IQ test' interviews that Google does now. A company needs some code janitors and code monkeys, and others, to go along with the top coders.
Google are an "us vs them" company now not a "great products" company and that's why they do these things like downvoting rings that lack integrity. That's just the tip of the iceberg, and it's going to get a lot worse.
> Why was Microsoft evil? Because back in the day they hired only the best and brightest nerds and geeks.
No. Because they abused a monopoly position hurting competition, therefore artificially inflating prices and preventing the kind of progress we see now in non-PC segments that are not suffocated by them.
Also, for extorting every Android handset maker with a bogus (and secret) list of patents.
Google has a monopoly on search in the US due to some early advances (letting them kick Yahoo, altavista, and similar early competitors to the corner) that now seems to mostly be maintained by both having sequestered some content by unfair licensing discrimination (such as YouTube in this example) and generally by "we have more of the web cached and indexed than anyone else" (a race they have a many years head start on, and barring some disruptive advance is probably going to be true for a long while).
They are now using the money they make advertising on that search system (if you check their Q10 they don't actually get much money from third party adsense websites: first party inventory dominates) in order to build large numbers of "engh, good enough but not great" services that are impossible to compete against because Google just gives them away for free or even operates them at a loss... it really isn't that different. They are even now starting to "bundle" things together with their search platform (G+) to directly leverage their position to propel other products.
This is especially clear as what really screwed Microsoft was trying to make certain everyone had access to a web browser that could itself be used as an application platform rather than having to pay license fees to a company (Netscape, if this isn't clear) that had such a large web usage marketshare that they were able to run roughshod over the W3 (to the point where their mailing list sometimes described Microsoft as the open hero that will save them; Microsoft even was providing their DTDs for public review, which impressed the crowd).
Netscape used this position to make up features we still hate like presentation-oriented markup, to hold back the original CSS attempts by being unwilling to implement them, and to add tons of proprietary features to their JavaScript engine that they considered a killer feature that others had to bug-for-bug emulate. I mean: I look at the situation and find it surprising that anyone wouldn't think it isn't the exact same story playing out a second (arguably, even a third) time ("you either die a hero or live long enough to become the villian", etc.).
Do you have any links furthering your explanation about Netscape? Typically the story is told much, much differently, and your allegations pique my interest here very much.
I think most of what he points out about Netscape's browser are down to a mix of frontier development (release now, fix later) and a measure of incompetence, rather than malice.
Netscape did try to use their position as temporary de-facto standard to bully there way through, tough they were not very successful at it.
* Releasing DTDs for review: the were very slow on this compared to MS. Some of that was abusing their position (as the incumbent de-facto standard they had some control, and keeping what they were doing internal for as long as they could forced competitors to either guess (resulting in conflicting behaviours some of which we still fight with today) or wait and implement late). Equally though I think some of it was just their business culture: they were not open by default, they did not want to release for comments until they considered it finished, and so forth. MS had little choice but to be open and play ball with the community: they'd have just been ignored for longer otherwise.
* "Netscape used this position to make up features we still hate like presentation-oriented markup": That is the frontier development thing. "Hey!, Look at this!, Isn't it cool!". Everyone was doing it, you just remember Netscape for it more because the legacy of some of their experiments/toys is still with us day-to-day.
* MS overtaking them on CSS support, particularly positioning, once it became a strong contender for the way to go was more to do with them struggling generally at the time. The application was being killed commercially by the free Internet Explorer which had at least got to the point of being "good enough" beyond being free, they were losing money server-side too due to competition there that they were not able to fight off, and the application itself had become somewhat complex and bug ridden (IIRC the 4.x series was chronically unstable, at least on Windows, until at least 4.0.8) so implementing anything new (and implementing it well) took more effort than they could afford to throw at it. Their alternative (layers) was implemented first and they paid the "jumped first, guessed the market wrong" price heavily: having to support their own idea for backwards compatibility and find time to implement the one that won more general acceptance.
* Most of the problems with JS cause by Netscape are from its beginnings: it was rushed to market. Most of the rest were them trying to keep ahead of the slow standards process - everyone else was doing that too.
> you either die a hero or live long enough to become the villian
Exactly. Well, almost.
Netscape were far from perfect and did (try to) abuse their position a bit, but if my memory is accurate (which it often isn't that far back, so have salt pinches at the ready) most of what they did wrong was due to bad business, process, and design decisions and being unwilling to backtrack on technical decisions that didn't work out so well (for reasons of compatibility: they too kept maintaining/reimplementing their old bugs so as to not alienate people with code relying on them) rather then concentrated deliberate malice.
> Netscape were far from perfect and did (try to) abuse their position a bit, but if my memory is accurate (which it often isn't that far back, so have salt pinches at the ready) most of what they did wrong was due to bad business, process, and design decisions and being unwilling to backtrack on technical decisions that didn't work out so well (for reasons of compatibility: they too kept maintaining/reimplementing their old bugs so as to not alienate people with code relying on them) rather then concentrated deliberate malice.
My personal belief is that the extent to which this is true for Netscape it is also true for Microsoft. (To be clear, I can also make these same kinds of arguments for Google: I state this explicitly as I really am not trying to paint Microsoft as "good" and Google as "bad"; however, I might come off as that while attempting to equate them, due to the preconceived notions that some people may have while reading the below "apologies".)
* They cared extensively about things like backwards compatibility, causing them to not like to change things once they built them; but they cared about being pioneers, so they often implemented things (such as CSS and XSL/T) when they were in their infancy, and got semi-locked in to details that weren't quite right (the box model was not some IE abomination: that's how the CSS box model was originally defined and it shifted underneath them).
* A lot of the things we didn't like about IE6 weren't actually intrinsic to IE6: it was because Microsoft stopped working on IE6 and it stagnated. Some people attribute this to them having "won", but that frankly makes a lot less sense than "they had their ass handed to them with tons of sanctions and other limitations, after a massive multi-year legal--not technical--battle with Netscape, that made working on browsers risky and emotionally challenging".
* They took on Sun and lost with Visual J++, which hobbled them for a while in their push to switch to using high-level language development, and led them to build the massive .NET ecosystem that is much less compatible with anyone else. (The only thing Microsoft did in J++ was add backwards compatibility for COM objects and build a Win32 GUI binding: otherwise, we would likely have ended up in a future where everything else was built on Java.)
This, by the way, I find to be a really interesting parallel; Sun was often on the sidelines, but has actually been a major player in all of these stories: they were already in bed with Netscape when they licensed the term "Java" to be used with "JavaScript", and then that furthered into the "Alliance" after AOL purchased Netscape; they then went on to pull legal challenges on the corruption of Java by first Microsoft (against whom they won, with the audience cheering them on) and now recently Google (against whom they lost, to the audiences' equal delight). The fact that so many people were willing to back Google screwing with Java while being willing to trounce Microsoft for it confuses me to no end: it seems to just come down to emotional bias.
> Do you have any links furthering your explanation about Netscape? Typically the story is told much, much differently, and your allegations pique my interest here very much.
Yes, actually: I have tons. I did a bunch of research for another comment I was going to leave to someone else a few months ago, and then decided "engh, not important, maybe will write an article about it some day"; here is that comment:
<< begin content I was working on a few months ago >>
So, I was also a web developer back in the late 90's: we used to go around to area businesses trying to explain to them what the Internet was (as they would, of course, never have heard of it), and ended up working on the first websites for such companies as our local bank, newspaper, and real-estate agency. I was doing this as early as 1996.
You know what? I have pretty clear memories of Netscape doing exactly these things everyone always gets angry at Microsoft over. Netscape, a company that sold a commercial web browser, was embarking on an embrace-and-extend campaign against HTML itself, and using the resulting influence to get bundled from ISPs as a default part of the Internet experience.
At the time, Internet Explorer existed, but was a joke: no one used it. Instead, sources reported that 70% of the people browsing the Internet were running Netscape Navigator.
> Netscape Navigator 2.0 is a standard on the Web; according to some surveys, it is used by 70 percent of all Web surfers.
What this meant is that when Netscape released new features that were specific to their browser, a lot of developers didn't think twice about using them.
> Even though unauthorized, the Netscape extensions have become commonly excepted tags and are used in many Web documents. <CENTER>...</CENTER> The Center tags is one of the most popular Netscape extensions (see the HTML Center Tag below).
Yes: even CENTER was a Netscape-specific extension. In fact, many of the tags that have long been considered "deprecated" and which many web designers consider cringe-worthy due to being "presentation-only", were added by Netscape and only adopted into the specifications because their usage was already too widespread. Netscape was considered fun to "bash" on the W3C mailing lists.
> Netscape seems to have conveniently ignored certain HTML tags which they don't want to use. They talk all sweet and innocent "Netscape remains committed to supporting HTML 3.0" But we all know that that's bullshit.
> Netscape is young and horny. Its market, by and large, does not understand what the possibilities are, does not understand what it's being denied by choosing Netscape exclusively, and does not yet care to learn. This is not a sitation where one can reasonably expect technological maturity.
> Instead, we get kludgey frames which practically trap the user into a page, <FONT> that we have to put everywhere (as opposed to putting it in one style sheet file), and image maps that are not text-compatible on the same page.
Note carefully the mention of style sheets: that is where the W3C was going at the time with their HTML 3.0, and Netscape couldn't wait. If you go back to books published at the time about HTML development, this was a well-known tradeoff: Netscape-specific extensions were designed to have you to embed styling information directly into the HTML.
> Many of Netscape's HTML extensions differ from the proposed HTML 3.0 standard in one big, important way. Netscape has implemented many page formatting options as custom HTML tags; HTML 3.0 proposes to handle formatting via a technique called style sheets.
Microsoft, in comparison, was actually looking pretty good. The developers were on the mailing list, and were even submitting the DTD's that they were using for validation of HTML for public comment before they released new versions. The people on the mailing list at the time really appreciated this, and made their opinions known publicly.
> Excellent! It's really encouraging to see a vendor supplying a DTD for a change.
> Excellent! OK: all you folks who told me that H* would freeze over before vendors issued SGML DTDs as documentation, I TOLD YOU SO. And to all the folks that fought the good fight with me, aren't you glad you did?
One person, in the same e-mail where they were early complaining about some Netscape-specific HTML features, even seemed to (begrudgingly) think that Microsoft might offer some hope in this battle against Netscape to maintain control of Internet standards.
> Might Microsoft come to the rescue in order to eat Netscape's lunch? After checking the Microsoft homepage, I see that they claim to be supporting W3C tables, but even then they are adding new attributes. Still, at least they say they'll support style sheets, and that they've concluded the agreement to add Java.
In fact, when we look back at Microsoft's Internet Explorer, the main things we hate are actually not places where they failed to adopt standards or built their own tools: it is when they adopted a standard very early, and then the standard changed out from underneath them. Stylesheets are a great example of this: the "IE box model" was in the standard when MS released.
You then mention ActiveX, but Netscape was pulling the same stunts with Java: their proprietary LiveScript features (which later became JavaScript) were designed to allow seamless back/forth communication with the Java VM (also not an open standard, to note). I remember working on websites at the time, and you'd find import statements in JavaScript code referencing out to Java classes.
When you then found Microsoft building JScript, a language compatible with the base JavaScript specification, that was tightly integrated to an alternative non-open system called ActiveX, it really wasn't surprising, nor was it in any way different from Netscape: both companies now had browsers that had a language compatible with a base (Netscape-defined, btw) specification that had deep integration with an external full programming environment.
Netscape had also added a feature allowing for Netscape-specific plugins which was becoming more and more popular. I remember there being more than a small handful of plugins that people reasonably expected you to have, to do everything from audio to animation.
<< I had not finished past this point, and hadn't finished sourcing the statements regarding LiveScript. I will probably write a longer fully-sourced article at some point soon, now that my time has been freed up from evasi0n's wave being largely over and Android Substrate finally being released. >>
So can google stay un-evil by claiming microsoft is evil too?
Abusing market power is not a zero sum game. You can escape by pointing fingers at others.
Would love to see some evidence that backs any part of that up. I'll wait.
If Google has widespread rings of employees dedicated to flagging anti-Google stories on Hacker News, do you honestly think that not one single person would have exposed it by now? That all people involved- including ex employees, most likely- would never talk?
> The more likely explanation is that Google fans and Microsoft haters are doign the flagging.
As a Google employee: yes. We don't like this any more than anyone else does. We want to _earn_ positive feedback. The idea of Google employees flagging (or being told to flag!) stories about Google they don't like is laughable to me.
Agreed, I also think its just overzealous fans acting on their own. By the way, Microsoft's response is stuck on the 2nd page despite getting a ton of upvotes
Note that the complaint is not about lack of upvotes, it's about people going out of their way to use their flagging powers which is meant only for spam links.
Don't make me relieve my callow youth and go on about the evils of 'M$'. ;) The ire directed at Microsoft back in the day was due to their ruthless business practices and their attack on Linux.
Whether employees of theirs ever indulged in things like astroturfing was irrelevant because their official actions were so upsetting.
>Looks like the Google fans, employees and shareholders on HN with good karma can't let this story break on the day of Google I/O? And people accuse Microsoft of astroturfing! What is this then?
Well, obviously this is a false flag attack by paid Microsoft astroturfers and shills! /s :)
What Google's been saying from 3 years while dragging it's feet is that Windows Phone does not have enough users to make an app for, but now their claim is that so many people are using the Microsoft Youtube App for Windows Phone that it's hurting the content creators. Huh? Why can't they monetize them by making an app and show twice as many ads in it just to spite WP users? No, they won't. They want to disadvantage Windows Phone compared to Android. Vimeo has had a Windows Phone app from a long time, and Google' can't afford to make one? And you believe them?
Why don't they come out with the real reason then, like Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, Skype, do about closing down things and eat up the bad press? Why beat around the bush and play delay tactics and hide behind facts? Oh, they want to protect their clean image of being "open" and "do no evil". This is a ploy by Microsoft to force Google to tell the public exactly why they refuse to make a Youtube app and even ban Microsoft from doing so.
How can Windows Phone have so few users that use YouTube that it's not worth monetizing and have so many users that use Microsoft's new app that it's hurting Google and content creator revenue? Why not agree to allow MS to show Google ads and make money since they don't have to spend the money to create the app but can take the profits?