Comment by recoiledsnake | Hacker News Reader

Comment by recoiledsnake | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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