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Comment by CurtHagenlocher | Hacker News Reader

On the one hand, this isn't really any different than Microsoft not supporting Office on Chromium.

On the other hand, isn't the whole point of web standards to avoid situations like this?

I suspect we'll just get confirmation of something we really already know: standards are really important only when you're not the market leader.

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> On the one hand, this isn't really any different than Microsoft not supporting Office on Chromium.

How's that the same? Web is a agreed upon standard. An OS is not.

It's the same in the sense that a company with a product isn't necessarily obligated to support all potential platforms for that product. But maybe a better comparison would be to point out that web access for Exchange was not officially supported on Chrome for many years.

EDIT: To put a slightly different spin on it, it's easy to try to turn this into a moral issue rather than a business decision -- particularly with Google's foolishly-publicized "don't be evil" motto. But supporting multiple platforms requires additional resources, and companies have to make the business decision whether or not to provide them.

No, it's not the same. It's one thing to say a product isn't obligated to support all potential platforms, it's another to actively disallow other platforms.

If you watch this video (or time travel back to about 4 hours ago and use a useragent string modifier) [0], you'll note that using a Lumia 920's user agent string [1] will redirect you to a desktop version of the site.

But now if you try it, the URL will redirect to the main search page.

[0] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Z8vfzurnKw

[1] Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 10.0; Windows Phone 8.0; Trident/6.0; IEMobile/10.0; ARM; Touch; NOKIA; Lumia 920)

Companies do things that hurt their competitors all of the time. Often, consumers are the beneficiaries (at least in the short term) -- as is the case when a new entrant into a market is able to provide a better or cheaper service, and supplants an older or less efficient competitor. There's nothing inherently wrong with this. Other times (like now, or when Google announced it was ending support for ActiveSync), the decision is a little more ambiguous. But in both cases, there's a potential cost for Google that's being avoided -- and that aligns nicely with competitive considerations. I don't think we want to live in a society where anyone can be legally compelled to provide a service at a loss to a small number of users.

The rules change, of course when we're close to a monopoly situation. But Google isn't at that point for either maps or mobile devices -- so at least legally, there's really no issue here.

I think that what people are really reacting to is that this is a decision which (at least superficially) is at odds with the way that Google markets themselves to us tech folks. And as such, it's a good reminder not to consume marketing messages without at least a few grains of salt.

I don't see it as at odds with how they market themselves. They position themselves as providing an Open, non-proprietary option as an alternative to monolithic and traditional closed solutions from Apple and Microsoft, and they are delivering on that in the form of Android.

Why should Google provide their service for free to their competitor's customers?

They have no obligation to do so. But then why not be honest about refusing service to users of a competing platform, rather than claiming that it's about the technical capabilities of the browser? This is something that was working on WP devices until today and has been intentionally disabled.

If that is the logic involved then why is iOS not affected?

Because iOS is still influential and they are hedging their bets.

Office Web Apps work fine in Chrome/Chromium.

Sure, they do now; it's a pretty sensible business decision given Chrome's market share. But there was some period of time after it came out -- I can't recall how long -- when Chrome was officially not supported by OWA (Outlook Web Access).

I work at Microsoft (but not on any product related to these) and I'm quite certain that this was the case.

The reason chrome was not supported earlier is probably because OWA possibly used some arcane and non-standard IE features that were lacking in chrome. Also AFAIK it never blocked the OWA outright (by redirecting to some other url instead)

My specific recollection is this:

On Ubuntu at home, I used Chrome for most things. But I specifically installed Firefox to be able to use the "better" version of OWA. OWA would still work on Chrome, but it would automatically downgrade to the less-capable version.

Presumably, Chrome and Firefox were similar enough that the same code should have worked with both.

Additionally, for years and years (until maybe two years ago) they did the same in Firefox, where you always got the less capable version that had no means to delete multiple emails at one. Man, that was annoying.

That being said, screw you Google, this is not OK. Maybe its business, but its not right. Time to start destroying my Google profile with Ghostery et al.

OWA specifically redirects Chrome for Linux to an older, static-html version. You have to spoof Firefox for Linux or spoof Chrome for Windows in order to get the rich client UI.

>On the one hand, this isn't really any different than Microsoft not supporting Office on Chromium

Err what? Does Chromium even have a API usable by third party devs?

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