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Comment by mtgx | Hacker News Reader

Larry Page seemed very upset [1] that Microsoft is basically leeching off their Gtalk contacts into Outlook, without returning the favor (with Skype I assume), and he said he'd prefer if things weren't like this and everyone was more open.

He didn't continue that idea, but I think he would've continued it with "...but since nobody wants to do that, then we won't do it anymore either". So they are probably responding in the same way they responded to the leeching of Gmail contacts by Facebook a few years ago, by blocking that API, or in this case replacing the XMPP protocol with a proprietary one. It's too bad it had to come to this, though.

[1] - http://www.theverge.com/2013/5/15/4334242/larry-page-to-tech...

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As a user, I am upset that it is getting harder to communicate with people. Everyone has their own non-interoperable (but cross platform!) protocols/networks/gardens now.

  * blackberry bbm
  * apple imessage
  * google hangouts
  * skype
  * whatsapp, etc.

As a user, am I supposed to have an account with one of each of these things? Have nine different apps open all the time? This is as bad as icq/messenger/aim/etc was back in the day. sheesh.

It's very simple: no XMPP? Then I'm not IM'ing with you. No SMTP? Then I'm not emailing with you. I might be the exception, but I don't care. I encourage others to do the same, and don't support in any way, shape, or form companies that keep doing these things. Someone comes to you with a problem caused by this BS (or just a problem with, say, the offender's platform in general), refuse to support them. Tell them to talk to their vendor.

I wish it were that easy. The problem with that is it at the end of the day, you're the only one at a disadvantage. The vendor doesn't need you and doesn't care. If your casual contacts and non-technical friends find communicating with you to be uncomfortable, they'll just move on without you.

And that sucks, and I don't like it, but I'm still not giving in. To be honest, I have a hard enough time keeping up with people I know IRL (which thankfully doesn't have these problems), and I can't see any of them cutting me off because I won't "upgrade" (they haven't yet).

This is a very good point. I think a lot of people tend to greatly overestimate the degree to which technology has the keys to their social life.

I'd love to live in this world with you. Literally, I think one friend I know, even of techie friends of friends that work in tech (msft, etc), would know what I meant if I said that without having to think for [too long].

It's why I'm so upset that a large network that had the potential to include a huge amount of people and volume AND LEVERAGE XMPP just spat in our faces.

I agree. I have only XMPP contacts for IM, and simply don't use any others.

Slight nitpick, Apple's iMessage (edit:) and BlackBerry's BBM) aren't _really_ cross platform (unless you consider OS X to iOS cross platform). It isn't really useful beyond Apple's walled garden.

Is BlackBerry's BBM available to other platforms?

Not yet, but it is slated to come to Android and iOS in the near term.

http://mashable.com/2013/05/14/bbm-ios-android/

Until then your nitpick should also include that as another walled garden ...

If you don't support Desktop you are not cross platform

This is why I am long on SMS.

iMessage is transparent, so that doesn't bother me. I have three [edit: four] solutions: GTalk, Email, Text, and Facebook. Except GTalk, they're all passive (i.e. I get messages from them on my phone without the app being open). Now that hangouts are available, it's 100% passive. This doesn't seem like that bad of an outcome to me.

That's 4. The old "off by one" error.

Well, I am a software engineer, so it's traditional. :P

Google is "open" unless everyone else isn't, in which case, forget about it?

Google is "open" unless they have the big stick, then they're not.

Seriously! The real question is why Google isn't sending Microsoft direct donations. They're so uncharitable.

That's rich when just today Google sent a C&D to Microsoft to take down the Youtube Windows Phone 8 app and refuse to make one themselves.

"Google demands Microsoft removes YouTube Windows Phone app, cites lack of ads "

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5714520

That was after they started serving a degraded experience to Windows Phone on Google Maps, and restored access after people complained and called their bluff that it didn't support needed features.

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/01/google-maps-windows-p...

Then they dropped support for ActiveSync from Gmail and Calendar so Microsoft had to scramble to add CalDAV support.

http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/21/3832838/windows-phone-card...

And then comes a second round of Spring Cleaning, which deprecates CalDAV support and moves to the Google Calendar API!

http://www.sparsebundle.net/posts/google-deprecating-caldav-...

Edit: Predictably, that post about Google asking for a takedown on the WP Youtube App is getting flagged.

http://i.imgur.com/4MBcGom.png

Just like the Windows 8.1 Blue being free post yesterday.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5707805

Google can do no wrong on HN, whereas everything Microsoft does is wrong.

That app shows Youtube videos without ads. That seems like a clear violation of Youtube's TOS and I don't blame Google for being upset about it. Edit: I woulnd't flag the story though.

Is there a YouTube API that provides the ads, or is Microsoft's only alternative to embed a YouTube web page?

The issue is that Google has refusing to give Microsoft access to the Youtube API for close to three years

See my comment in the other post.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5714520

The AppleTV YT app doesn't show ads either.

Google negotiated a contract with Apple in that instance. This is the way the old iOS app worked too - Apple licensed the API in exchange for them building it.

The main issue is that partners that use revenue sharing couldn't restrict their videos from playing on WP devices that wouldn't generate ad revenue. Normally, you can block devices from having content if revenue sharing is unavailable, something Microsoft circumvented.

>That app shows Youtube videos without ads. That seems like a clear violation of Youtube's TOS and I don't blame Google for being upset about it

So, for years, Google's stated reason for lack of a Youtube client was that Windows Phone didn't have enough marketshare, and now suddenly it has so many users that it loses so many ad impressions because Microsoft's Youtube that the content creators are suffering because all the millions of freeloaders using Windows Phone?

i.e It doesn't care enough for the ad impressions on Windows Phone to itself make an app , but when MS does, the loss of the same revenue is the reason for sending the lawyers in and pulling the app?

Google's "lack of marketshare" reason seems to be a bit lacking to me. Windows 8 sold 100 million and they still don't make any apps for it.

In contrast, Yahoo Mail which is barely making any money by manages to make a nice one.

http://apps.microsoft.com/windows/en-us/app/yahoo-mail/f90f3...

And Vimeo has apps for both WP and Win8.

http://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/store/app/vimeo/ff8dadc8-8...

http://apps.microsoft.com/windows/en-us/app/vimeo/6608d199-0...

They make a Windows 8 app which provides access to all of their services (with ads): Chrome.

I'm pretty sure Google makes a ton of apps that work just fine on Windows 8, a user has but to open their browser to access them.

I think it has more to do with not having access to the API to display those ads. I have strayed from Google ever since I got a windows phone. Found decent replacements for most of their services, however Youtube is one thing that has and may never have a real replacement!

Had it been a Google startup, it may not have bothered me so much. I was using it way before Google brought it and now I am punished with a second class service for my choice of phone? That is just sad. :(

Just hope the same won't follow when Ubuntu and Firefox launch their phones.

Apparently it also has a button to download videos from YouTube. Google's been C&Ding anyone that does that for years.

I wonder how Google would react if the websites that fuel it's search database started having TOS terms for search engines like "In your search results, you must also display the advertisements on the pages that you scrape".

A few sites doing that wouldn't have any effect. Google would probably just remove them. How many websites it would take for Google to actually pay attention though? 20%? 30%? 50%?

That wouldn't work. Search and display snippets of search results have been ruled as fair use in multiple cases for their transformative value. You wouldn't have a copyright claim and robots.txt has been upheld as an industry standard/easily implementable escape hatch to make it known that the crawler should not index the specified sites/pages.

You could certainly say, "I'll keep you blocked in robots.txt (or block by IP or whatever) until you show my ads", but you are unlikely to succeed in that, and then there are still the downsides of not being listed in search results to consider.

The point of a search engine is to drive traffic to the pages that contain advertisements. MS was putting "eye's" on the content without the ads.

I'm not sure how these compare. The XMPP case and demanding the youtube app are two examples of Microsoft taking from Google but not wanting to return anything. In the case of Youtube, they're taking bandwidth but not giving back ad revenue, which is legitimate.

While I don't think that every action you list is necessarily Google trying to screw over Microsoft (dropping support for common protocols hurts everyone, not just Microsoft), I also can't deny there's some obvious bad blood between them. It doesn't help that Google has a fair number of ex-microsoft employees, and they have A LOT of products in competition with each other (google vs bing, gdocs vs office, android vs wp, chrome vs IE, etc etc etc)

And the fact that HN would have a slight bias towards Google should not be a surprise, as Microsoft veers more towards the business side of software while Google veers more towards the open source, free stuff, etc etc. Which do you think people would honestly be more supportive of?

Given Microsoft's track record, for, oh, I don't know, their entire existence, it's no surprise they're not well-liked. Whereas Google just hasn't had nearly three decades to be evil; give them time.

Drop of activesync meant google don't have to pay a license fee. But your right, the world revolves around you.

They dropped caldav too.

Google have not dropped support for CalDAV. It's still available, you just have to fill out a form first.

Gtalk will still be available though.

"... which users may choose to use instead of Google Talk."

I don't think it's reasonable to expect Google Talk to remain indefinitely though - if you need XMPP you at least want an exit strategy if Hangouts isn't suitable. It's quite telling that the Hangouts app on Android is called "Hangouts (replaces Talk)" and takes Talk's URL in the play store.

In GTalk's case any XMPP client will do so an official app is almost irrelevant in its case.

Right, but you still need Google's XMPP server to support it.

It's still there.

For now.

Despite the clear warning signs, I am willing to put money on people whinging in a year or two when they shut down those servers, just like everyone got all upset about Reader.

And whining about shutting down Reader accomplished what, exactly?

Absolutely nothing of course. Didn't stop people from whining; people love to whine on the internet.

There was no good replacement for Reader two years ago. There are plenty of federated XMPP servers around now.

Plenty of federated XMPP servers, true, but unlike Reader, XMPP requires other users on federated servers to be useful. Since the Reader brouhaha I'd been considering moving away from GApps back to hosting my own mail and xmpp. Now Google has made the XMPP side of that worthless, 87% of my IM contacts use G(Mail|Talk), and will switch to Hangouts.

If they do that, people will migrate off Gmail too. I know I will.

"may" my ass. Google forced the Google+ extension on me faster than Steve Jobs used to declare that white was the new black.

Until it gets killed, in 2 years from now. Or less.

don't expect that to last too long. the google talk android app updates to become hangouts, and the chrome extension became hangouts automatically today.

Will GTalk be able to communicate to users of Hangouts, though, or will everyone be forced over to Hangouts in order to continue to speak to the people who move over? I'm guessing the latter.

Yes, for now they're basically the same service. I'd imagine that this will change as Hangouts diverges more and more from what Talk supports, to the point where Talk will be killed due to disuse.

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