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Comment by barista | Hacker News Reader

The reason its not supported is not because of technological limitations. It's just anti competitive practices from Google.

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There is nothing 'Anti-Competitive' about not providing your free service to customers of your competitor. If people want Google services they can choose Android.

It's worth remembering that Android was developed in the first place to be an Open alternative to prevent Windows phone from taking off. Why would they go to all the trouble of developing Android only to prop up Microsoft.

Of course it's anti-competitive! They took something that was working on a competitor's phone platform and intentionally caused it to stop working. It's probably not illegal, but if it's designed to harm a competitor it is by definition anti-competitive.

Not adding value to your competitor's products for free is simply competitive and part of normal business. "Anti-competitive" is a different thing and means using market power to suppress competition, whereas this move is about intensifying it.

First of all, forget "not adding value to your competitor's product" - this is about removing value that was already there.

Secondly, Google has market power in both the mobile device OS market and the online map market compared to MS, and is trying to leverage its position in the latter to hurt MS in the former. This seems like exactly your stated definition of anti-competitive behavior. How is this "intensifying" competition?

There are multiple players in the map market, Microsoft themselves being one of them. Google are competing against Microsoft by asking customers to choose between their integrated mobile offerings rather than supporting Microsoft by giving them a second maps option for free.

Can't you just install a different browser on WP8? Or is Microsoft locking down their platform to only the IE engine?

I'd say its just the opposite. It's anti-competitive practices from MS. They're trying to build their own walled in hardware/software garden. It would make more sense to me if MS was blocking Google stuff, not the other way around.

They probably figure if they let Google in on some things, then they open the door to supporting all of Google's apps like gmail, chrome, calendar, google docs, etc. Which goes against them wanting people to use outlook.com, their calendar, MS office and IE as their main browser.

> It's anti-competitive practices from MS.

I down-voted you because in this particular case this is not true, I'd say the opposite happens.

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