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Comment by espadrine | Hacker News Reader

Here is a response from a Microsoft employee:

> […] Edge itself integrates with Cortana and offers various options that other browsers may or may not. Those integrations and options are likely to grow over time. Basically you can think of the search as a single end-to-end transaction in terms of the feature design, meaning that handoff to an undetermined browser or search engine doesn't produce the desired experience for the feature.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/04/cortan...

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Nobody believes that, Google would have helped for free in any integration needed, maybe using a "cortana" chrome extension.

And even if that's false, is still pretty easy to set up the implementation to be generated HTML that works on any modern browser.

The know nobody wants to use Bing, this is just another shady move Microsoft.

What, you mean like when Google blocked Microsoft's YouTube app for Windows Phone?

http://www.theverge.com/2013/8/15/4624706/google-blocks-wind...

Because MS violated Google's TOS.

People conveniently forget that part.

No Google used its ToS to move the goal post and demanded MS to have the app in HTML5, which it does not do for neither Android nor iOS. Everyone knew Google was snipping WP and hiding behind legalese.

No, google did not move the goal posts.

There were, in fact, at the time, various 3rd party YouTube apps that worked perfectly well and were completely within the scope of the TOS - I personally preferred Jasmine on iOS to the official client.

Microsoft, however, decided that they were a special snowflake and didn't need to play by the rules. In fact, they also removed ads from YouTube -- Google's source of income with respect to YouTube.

Google was no doubt snipping WP. But Microsoft was in the wrong on that one - which just made it easier for Google. And the reason MS didn't want to do an HTML5 client for WP (and didn't want to admit it either) was that the HTML5 implementation on WP was not good enough to run YouTube reasonably. So they put themselves in the spot of either admitting an inferior browser or violating TOS. Either way, they made it easy for Google to hurt them.

Well funny enough, at that same time, Google blocked WP access to Google Maps, even through the browser. They claimed Google Maps only works properly in Webkit, even though it worked just fine in IE if you could get around their block. Couple that with the fact that, even after Google blocked WP's YouTube app, Google and Microsoft worked together to make a new app on HTML5 (proving wrong your claims that WP's HTML5 support wasn't good enough to support YouTube, the problem was WP plays HTML5 video through the built-in system media player and Google didn't want that), and after their collaboratively developed app was released, Google blocked it again. At the same time, Google wasn't enforcing iOS apps to be built purely with the HTML5 APIs, so literally only Microsoft had to follow these restrictions. The end result was, YouTube was only accessible through the browser and not through an app. Google then followed up these two things almost immediately with an announcement that they were dropping support for syncing Google calendars with Windows Phone.

I'm sorry, but there's no way to be on Google's side during that fight. It was a purely anti-competitive pissing contest. You don't have to be on Microsoft's side, but there is no legitimate way to say that Google wasn't abusing their dominant position over a competitor when it came to how they behaved in the early days of Windows Phone. There was a pattern of outright hostility. Google even said "we know where our users are, and they're not on Windows Phone". Since I was a Windows Phone user, I took the hint and stopped using all Google services. It's petty nonsense, and we all got enough of that in the 90s.

While I followed it, there were two Microsoft versions blocked by Google, no joint versions to speak off, and totally subpar YouTube website experience because WP's html5 support was inadequate - but I stopped following at some point, so we might both be right.

With respect to Google calendar - that indeed was a retaliation at Microsoft. Your story would be more complete if you mentioned that at the time, Microsoft was both threatening android makers with patents AND charging Google for patents related to Exchange services. While the timing probably was decided to best hit WP, I heard dropping exchange was planned a while before.

Incidentally, microsoft's response was "no, no, no! You don't have to pay exchange patent fees anymore, just let WP users use Google services again". And I am happy to report that, as you know, Google ignored that plea. Microsoft has been subdued into an almost reasonable market participant position - and I suspect this fight is one of the reasons.

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