Microsoft is embracing Android as the mobile version of Windows
theverge.com
theverge.com
Paying for Microsoft to host a replacement services layer for your app on Azure would be cheaper than paying Google a 30% cut once you got past a certain use threshold.
As a bonus you can mitigate Google's decision to walk back Android being open and simultaneously give people who have decided to un-Google their lives an alternative to moving to iOS which would risk them moving to a Mac at the same time.
It seems like YouTube should have more than enough market share for EU competition law to apply.
I'm not speaking for Google but if I'm building a streaming app, I won't like other people make "clones" without my permission or review. Reasons are:
1. Customers who meet bugs on these clones may blame me but it's actually bugs in these clones.
2. Compability may be a pain because I have no idea how these clones use my "API". This happens a lot when Mint is scraping webpages for data and fails on webpage redesigns. "something appears to be working" is a light year away from "what guaranteed to be working".
3. One solution may be building the official app for windows phones but it just doesn't financially work out. WP never got traction to justify the cost of migrating a big app like Youtube to some totally different platform. Might be chicken and egg problems though.
What do you think can be solutions for the problems above? Standardization might help but online video site is not something you can easily carve out a "standard".
Where I walk, the only trash talking is about management and how fucking far behind we're lagging re. the competition. Burying the competitor's product is narcissistic and pathetic. Maybe this had been ordered from above.
Why?
What good is a morale event for a team where everyone talks about how far behind they are ?
By this I mean only the app platform. WP7's built-in UI and apps got lots of praise for being buttery smooth because they weren't using .NET or Silverlight, they had a private ui framework.
There was also the hd7 which was a very similar device.
But Steam has proven them wrong. Win32 is still strong and Steam makes millions.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/porting/desktop...
For example:
Windows 8 1st edition was just a start menu with a uwp focus, with a desktop as a third class citizen. When win8 start menu with uwp could have been offered as a single app for Windows 7 platform. That would have been a great buzz pavong the way for Windows phone and windows rt.
Users don't want uwp or whatever new stack MS wants to impose. They want continuous access to their existing purchases of win32 apps. That MS calls win32 'legacy' matters very little.
Win32 lives because there are millenia of man-hours invested into Win32 applications. If one day Win32 would disaapear, they would be not ported to UWP or other framework of the day.
Whey would be ported to the Web. But while Win32 lives, the cheapest path is to maintain them as Win32.
In the EU, a 40% market share is large enough to place your conduct under these restrictions, so actions that would be perfectly legal in the US can be quite illegal there.
Also, the chance of the EU competition commission buying the advertising argument is approximately zero.
>Microsoft agreed to Google’s terms and in version 3.2 of the YouTube app, released earlier this week, they had enabled Google’s advertisements, disabled video downloads and eliminated the ability for users to view reserved videos
https://m.windowscentral.com/microsoft-responds-detail-googl...
Your idea of a potential remedy for this behavior may not be the one they land on.
However, it is certainly a remedy which they have employed in the past, something Microsoft is very much aware of:
>The 2004 [Microsoft antitrust] ruling ordered the company to open up source code for server communications protocols to rivals, in order to allow them to build server programs that work as smoothly with Windows as Microsoft's own software.
https://www.networkworld.com/article/2311190/software/ms-ant...
If Microsoft could do that to Google, can we do that to other companies? Can we write custom Netflix clients for unsupported platforms too? Or for another services? That a deep rabbit hole to follow.
And it would only apply to companies that are so big, they act as a monopoly in some market segment. I don't see why forcing those to use open standards and documented APIs, so that everyone else can interop with them, is a bad thing.
I mean, imagine this being applied to Facebook. I suspect that if you could do everything that you can on their website through an API, that alone would be sufficient to defeat the barrier to entry to the social network market that is practically insurmountable today, and thereby create more healthy competition. Isn't that a good thing?
You must have a large enough market share for it to apply, and you must be using that market share as a weapon against competitors in another market.
> You must have a large enough market share for it to apply, and you must be using that market share as a weapon against competitors in another market.
I think Netflix is big enough for it, and yet they prohibit every custom client (thanks to DRM).
I am sure they are the top priority for Youtube.
Are there any good alternatives to YouTube at all? Isn't YouTube already filled with so much of culturally-significant content (lectures, music etc) that blocking particular people (i.e. Windows Phone users) from watching it means putting them in a huge disadvantage like if they were not allowed to read any kind of books?
(disclaimer: I work for Google on GCP)
Well, through web browsers that Google chooses to support, given at least Gmail uses UA whitelisting (and, at various times, various non-Chrome Chromium based browsers have been excluded). If Google chooses not to support any browser that runs on the given system and blocks access to any other browser, then Google absolutely can block access to them.
>As discovered by The Verge, the TV-optimized web version of YouTube is no longer accessible on the Fire TV. Instead, visitors using both Amazon’s Silk browser and Firefox for Fire TV are being redirected to the full desktop client.
https://9to5google.com/2018/01/22/google-blocks-youtube-tv-o...
Maps is a tricky beast. Given Google Maps has been around for so long, there may be a lot of licensing going on with the images. You also have to comply with various government requests to be able to host images of specific areas.
EDIT: A quick search shows it was always disabled by default, since 2007, when it launched.
That's not the case for YouTube, though, which is exactly why it's a problem when GMail isn't.
Who would ever make an app for something that doesn't even have youtube--when trashy tv boxes do?
Who would get and keep a phone that doesn't have the apps they and their friends use?
Google didn't want to let Microsoft develop their own YouTube client because Google frequently changes how the YouTube client works. Microsoft could have wrapped the web client, but after they acted stupidly Google didn't want to further cooperate.
As for "don't conform to Terms and Conditions" ... well, if you guys don't offer an API to build a conforming app, then such a complaint is misleading, because there's no way to build one. So what you're really saying is that you will block all apps except your own, or made with your blessing. And then we're back to square one - your refusal to grant such a blessing to an app on a competing platform is abuse of your monopoly position wrt YouTube.
Mobile browsers do allow that, YouTube just breaks that functionality for reasons unknown. They do it on mobile only as well, videos do play in the background when I use the desktop site.
Or if you use a browser that supports add-ons and install something like https://addons.mozilla.org/android/addon/video-background-pl... to block Youtube from accessing the APIs it uses to detect when a tab has been backgrounded.
And the reasons aren't that unknown - if I'm not mistaken background playback is one of the selling points of a Youtube Premium (formerly Red) subscription.
I deleted the YouTube app from my iPhone and iPad because I would rather use the website and if you click on a YouTube link it will launch the app. The YouTube app doesn’t support background playback without paying for YouTube Red and it doesn’t support picture in picture mode on the iPad - I use a third party app.
That being said, the option may be available soon, since the EU and Russia have both fined and prohibited Google's agreements with manufacturers, and the Department of Justice is rumored to be considering opening an investigation here in the US.
> Why we thought it would be possible to have all our hardware made in China without the Chinese compromising it is beyond me.
>> MmmHmm. Texas Instruments should really consider making a smart phone.
Between populist protectionism on one hand, and espionage fears on the other, it would be interesting if we see more American OEMs crop up in the next few years.
[0] https://www.metafilter.com/176872/Spy-chips-found-on-server-...
"We give up the ability to monopolize this technology in exchange for creating an alternative that the marketplace accepts."
I wonder how viable that is.
It is totally possible to reimplement play services, Amazon does it anyway.
You would need to duplicate gmail and youtube though.
And also kickstart an app store good enough so that all the apps 99% of the users are looking for are there.
Even for a company as big as Microsoft, this looks like a huge task.
This was precisely how Windows Phone failed, so...
I think the larger problem with my vision is simply that its not in line with the visions of the various competitors I listed. Everyone believed they could create their own separate mobile fiefdom (Amazon's Android fork, Windows Phone, Tizen, etc).
That being said Youtubes mobile site isn't abysmal and I'm not a fan of how the last decade saw the open web replaced by proprietary apps. A lot of sites work fine in a browser on a phone but still push users to use an application to interact with them.
I sincerely hope they get slapped hard over this. You're not supposed to be able to abuse a monopoly like that. Your sentiment shows exactly why it's detrimental - because it's a major barrier to competition.
Just is definitely a 4-letter word here.
Although personally I'd rather they target getting the x86 phone chip manufacturing restarted and get us full win10 handheld devices.
I feel like this is something everyone says they want (including me), but history doesn't prove the demand is there.
The quality of the maps is another matter. It's hard to compete with Google on this, just because of the headstart that they have (Apple has the same problem). But it's certainly possible.
https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd-fonts
> Note: These both work fine with WSLtty
Do you have a source about that? The Android emulation on Windows 10 Mobile was actually Hyper-V based. IF you just started your phone, the emulated Android was not ready (started) yet, and if you attempted to start an app you got that message.
https://twitter.com/benhillis/status/857094460961943552
I believe the Hyper-V based Android emulation is separate from Project Astoria and came later.
(If you're asking why Windows in the first place, well that is another discussion entirely.)
Why would anybody but legacy-encumbered enterprises actually use a web browser by Microsoft nowadays?
> but they don't need to be the app store
But wouldn't it be good if there were more than one fairly-big and well-advertised app store? In fact the situation when there is just one seems worrying, e.g. Apple is already misusing their monopoly on iOS devices actively.
As for Edge, the mobile browser doesn't use Microsoft engine. Edge on Android is based on Blink but has Windows desktop integrations. Personally I use Edge on my laptop because it's much lighter on battery life and I rarely encounter compatibility issues with sites.
I expect people have various reasons. Personally, my installs of FF/Chrome/Vivaldi are locked down in various ways to not accepts cookies/scripts, so I use Edge for sites that break in my other browsers that I don't need to access often enough to bother whitelisting. Same way I use Safari on macOS.
The major selling point for Windows is that it comes preinstalled on the Dell/HP/Lenovo computers our muggles buy. For corporations, the ability to manage identities and lock down the machines from a central location is a killer. The main selling point of Windows for web developers is that it can do that and still run Office well.
As a developer, I'm unconvinced about the value of that second part though. And not convinced at all about the first one too because Macs are Linux-like enough and Linux machines, well, are Linux machines (even when they come with Windows, installing Debian, Ubuntu or Fedora is a zero-effort thing).
As for games... Well... Just buy a gaming rig or a PlayStation. I don't want games on my work computer.
Docker is so dependant on Linux that any attempt to write a native containerisation for another OS would mean starting from scratch. And the licensing of both Windows and MacOS would make it a non-starter.
https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/virtualization/2017/12/0...
"Today, Scott Guthrie, Microsoft's executive vice president of the cloud and enterprise group, said in an interview, "it's about half now, but it varies on the day because a lot of these workloads are elastic, but sometimes slightly over half of Azure VMs are Linux." Microsoft later clarified, "about half Azure VMs are Linux.""
https://www.wired.com/2015/09/microsoft-using-linux-run-clou...
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-showcases-t...
However, I could have swore I read semi-recently that Azure itself was primarily running on Linux, but I could be wrong here in some regards.
This application provides display and control of Android devices connected on USB (or over TCP/IP). It does not require any root access. It works on GNU/Linux, Windows and MacOS.
Did Microsoft have a choice?
https://www.statista.com/statistics/266136/global-market-sha...
Secondly, does anyone know why Microsoft quit competing when it came to mobile? It seems something so odd that future history books are going to point it out. I mean I really don't get it. Unless if they are planning to ramp up and go whole hog on Continuum and they don't want to worry about supporting older phones, which this lull allows them to do.
[0]: https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-is-making-2bn-a-year...
They need to target for specific market segment (lets say phones for corporate and office, or phone for developer) that has minimum apps (whatsapp, etc) and easy to port from other platform (ex: from xamarin / android app). Of course they need to rethink the monetization scheme to match android's price.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/310-microsoft-patents-used-in-...
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extingu...
Even, or especially, if they say otherwise.
The OP is about MS. The title is about embracing. The parent comment mentioned extending it. I must be old and just couldn't pass up the historical hacker pop culture references. My apologies.
Don't sprain your wrists while shaking your pitch forks.
It's called learning a lesson (repeatedly). Don't trust Google. And don't trust Microsoft, now or in 2003. Don't trust companies, period. Always have an exit plan and try not to get locked inside their boxes if possible. These companies exist to make money, so power and control is what they want. That doesn't mean we can't appreciate good products or initiatives, just keep in mind that the boot and the giving hand belong to the same entity.
This, the fact that their technology spreads like a cancer through an organisation (through dependencies), and the extent to which corporations are completely at the mercy of their byzantine licensing system has often made me wonder why Redmond hasn't been bombed by some military yet.
Google did that with a newly introduced products, which you could simply not start using.
So yes, Microsoft are still the bad guys.
They are doing this while making the tools to do so Open Source.
You are not free to control your computing in this ecosystem, but hey that's a small price to pay.
And people are eating this up. Precisely because they aren't worried about history.
As for how embracing Android fits into this, it's not clear how it doesn't.
Everyone wants to own the ecosystem. Everyone is patient enough to integrate with others', but with experiences that are just a little worse than going all-native.
MS gets the worst hate because of history, when it was the only juggernaut. But now we have many juggernauts, and they all behave more or less similarly.
> you can still use carddav, caldav, and xmpp
Xmpp is gone, *dav only via 3rd party apps. Also Google doesn't delete Chinese and other apps which stole user data like Apple does.
I have a feeling they will double down and it will now be an Android blight
Examples..
can cut/copy and paste files mutiples times and it will queue them up..
When copying files it shows progress + graphs the speed.
Right click on windows button to get list of loads of common management tools (that b4 u had to dig down to in various weird places)
Alt-tab shows little thumbnail of each program running.
thumbnails of image files and whatnot in explorer
loads of option in the explorer GUI for searching and displaying files
powershell
drag window to side to have it take up half the screen
etc. etc.
These are all great useful and non intrusive design ideas. Thats good design. And I reckon they came about from more grassroots action, eg. customer feedback or boots on the ground engineers.
'Design concepts' like Metro are the kind of shit that marketing or upper management come up with as part of some dubious business or marketing scheme, and then are awkwardly and irritatingly foisted upon the engineers and users alike. That kind of BS is utterly regressive.
I hope they can give themselves a price break.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/310-microsoft-patents-used-in-...
But later reports suggest they're making a lot less now.
It's more like some universal OS for Google products that'll probably be ready for launch in 2-3 years or so. Sure, IoT may be one of the goals of Fuchsia, but I'm sure it's meant for future phones as a step by step replacement for Android and future Chromebooks, probably starting with Pixel devices or whatever they'll rebrand to next year.
It remains to be seen whether business (legacy Android) or technical (new system arch) will win out at Google.
We're at the mercy of chip process engineers to a greater degree than is generally recognized.
Stuff like project Treble have taken most of the engineering time on that release .. it seems that at least for now the plan is to still have Android in 10 years
(it should be noted that Fuchsia and Flutter are AFAIK teams that are completely separate from the Android framework team)
And well, the state of the OS is .. ok I guess ? Like all projects of this size, building APIs is building future regret.
Some can be rewritten. Some are so bad they are revamped. Some are meh but not bad enough to warrant the trouble of changing them.
What will be in Google's interest?
If you want to make money in mobile, you have to prioritize iOS.