Google to Microsoft: Remove your YouTube App from the Windows Phone Store
wpcentral.com
wpcentral.com
1) Build app that clearly violates spirit and word of TOS, steals content, blocks ads.
2) Complain and act surprised like Google is being a bad guy when told to take it down.
3) ???
4) Profit!
Now they just need to some how spin in some automatic #droidfail hash tags to all the videos they show in the app and it'll be perfect!
Idiots.
(No, not the developers. I feel an immense sympathy for the people who had to work on this; their managers are the ones who are idiots)
Google PR on the other hand, is extremely good, they have lots of people believing they're all about "do no evil" and "open" while laughing all the way to the bank.
I agree, how dare they make money.
I understand the desire for a youtube app by WP8 owners, but Microsoft very clearly wanted this back in the news cycle.
Besides MS has much greater recourse than violating the Terms of Service, to the point of circumventing YouTube's ad revenue. If you take MS at their word, it appears they believe Google is engaging in anti-competitive practices, and if they truly believed that then their remedy is in Court not by unilaterally developing a YouTube App in bad-faith.
Notwithstanding G+, it is sometimes over looked that Google already had one of the most successful social networks in YouTube. Separately, it is often over looked that MS also has one of the most successful social networks in Xbox Live.
Bullshit - this isn't Google screwing over Microsoft, it's Microsoft being idiots. If MSFT built a YouTube app that didn't blatantly violate Google's policies, I don't think it'd be a problem.
YouTube wants viewers, regardless of which platform they're coming from.
Then why don't they make an Windows Phone YouTube app and show ads on it? Hell, show double the ads just to annoy WP users. Or are they afraid that it will hurt Android?
It's simple economics; don't waste money helping people dethrone your monopoly (I AM NOT ADVOCATING THIS POSITION, SIMPLY STATING MY PERCEPTION).
If you really believe that, I have a bridge to sell.
Give me a break, Google is doing this to hurt the adoption of Windows Phone.
If you really believe that, I have a bridge to sell ... after I stop laughing.
Google has obviously determined that WPs tiny marketshare isn't enough to justify creating a native app when the browser will work decently enough. Thinking otherwise is just ... idiotic.
Yes, Google is making a big deal out of this when apps like MetroTube already do the same thing. The difference here is its Microsoft, a huge company who has gone out of its way to sling shit on Google, instead of 2 dudes from NZ.
Then why don't they give access to the Youtube videos and ads API to Microsoft? Microsoft has stated that they're happy to add Google's ads if given access.
It's taken more than 20 years, but Microsoft is finally reaping the fruits of their bullying.
An eye for an eye is a bit extreme, but fear of retaliation is an important component of balanced societies; see e.g. The cold war or the Stanford prison experiment. It's time Microsoft start behaving less like.a psychopath bully and more like a member of society.
http://venturebeat.com/2012/08/28/youtube-xbox-app/
I guess they can forward the original e-mail to the WP devs...
Or perhaps the Xbox Youtube app was written by Google like the first line of your article says, so the Xbox devs don't have access to the API.
You sure write a lot of unintelligent comments in your haste to criticize MS and pump Google, but this one takes the cake.
It is sad that Microsoft decided to strip the Ads and allow downloads from their own, because the Windows Youtube App may never come back now.
They must've known that this will get press attention, and companies like this weigh the impact of such attention very carefully before making a move. I'd love to understand the real motive behind this.
[1] I'm unsure of the numbers!
Also, if you're referring to the comments on WPCentral, of course, it's "Windows Phone Central" where obviously fans and users of Windows Phone who got frustrated for years with the lack of a quality YouTube app on their phone hang out.
I haven't ported any of my own apps to Win Phone either - what's the point when nobody is using it? Out of 60,000 visits to our site over a given period, 4000 are iOS, 2000 Android, 50 blackberry and 20 Windows Phone. We haven't bothered with blackberry either (apart from providing an html5 version).
Face it Microsoft: Windows Phone is a dismal failure.
So Google's complaint is that "nobody" is using the Windows Phone Youtube app and that this is hurting Youtube because "nobody" is watching so many ad-less videos on Youtube that it's robbing Youtube and content creators of all the "no money" gotten from no ad views in the app which used by nobody? Oh, and did I mention nobody can use the Windows Phone Youtube app because nobody is using Windows Phone?!
Google's argument is simply that Microsoft, a company that should know better, is intentionally breaking the Youtube ToS. The lack of native app is because Google has determined that WP users can "live with" watching videos in the browser for the time being.
So did a smart guy say once about Apple. I went from being a hardcore Android fan to just falling in love with my Lumia phone. Everyone I know who has a windows phone has been happy with it. So no I don't think it is a dismal failure.
I have found replacements for most Google services but there doesn't exist or may never exist one for Youtube. I was a user of Youtube before Google was a buyer, so yes it sucks to be given a second class treatment because you made the unpopular choice for your phone. Hope this doesn't repeat, you know with Ubuntu and Firefox phones coming out.
Who ever did is either eating crow for that, or isn't as smart as he claimed.
Microsoft has been in the mobile business for a long time. They have tried to re-invent their offerings at least two times, probably more. There are a lot of OEMs with knives in their backs (e.g.: Sendo, OQO) in the wake.
That they have failed to succeed after blowing such a lead and countless investment dollars is a real organizational character failure on their part. That some in Redmond think they're still winning is even sadder.
See the issue?
> Everyone I know who has a windows phone has
> been happy with it.
Whether the people actually using the OS likes it or not is besides the point, it's the actual number of people that use said OS that's the point.
Try finding the Walmart exclusive windows phone Lumia 521 which came about a week ago, you can't, its selling like hot pancakes all across America. Its only a matter of time till Windows Phone becomes a real competitor and the reason why Google is worried.
Perhaps the same laws that force Microsoft to offer alternative to Internet Explorer in Windows...
Antitrust is a serious matter, let's not trivialize it.
Until a court says otherwise, nothing compels Google thus.
Just remember that according to the courts, Google doesn't even have a monopoly on search. It is far fetched that they have a monopoly on "community contributed videos", if that's even a market sector that would be considered for antitrust.
> They need to kill it and millions of Windows Phone
> users will be left with no legal YouTube app.
> How do they update the app if Google doesn't give them
> access to the API? They need to kill it and millions of
> Windows Phone users will be left with no legal YouTube app.
There is a public YouTube API, documented at https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/ , which Microsoft could have used if they were interested in implementing a TOS-compliant app.
https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/getting-started#quo...
The exact throttling values are not posted publicly, but there are multiple third-party apps using the YouTube APIs successfully, so I expect the limits are high enough for a standard client to work without problems.
Life sometimes sucks like that. Microsoft did not play by the rules, and now they have to pay for it. Cry me a river.
Yes, lets lynch and ban the last couple of commenters on HN who don't hate 'M$' so that we can sip coffee at Google IO while using Macbooks to flag Surface Pro review stories and vote up Ruby and Go posts in peace.
They will defend Microsoft at every turn and they will attack Google in every comment they make about them. Their posting history is very desciptive.
Offhand I can list mtgx, rbanffy(who mentions he hates Microsoft in his HN profile page), or Toshio and lots of iOS fans and Google fans and employees and nobody seems to get bothered by them but somehow it's not okay for Microsoft fans to post on here?
It is funny to read how quickly a news.ycombinator discussion degenerates when talking about Google, Microsoft or Apple.
What's funny is that in my experience, these denigrating terms came from each system's users, not from "the opposing tribe."
At my school we used the TRS-80, and constantly bemoaned its (many) faults, and dreamed of having Apple IIs ... and then one time we went to a computer show and met some kids from another school which used Apple IIs—who told us how much they hated their Crapples and how they wished they had TRS-80s... ><
Quite typical actually. Google is the only tech giant with a slogan like "don't be evil", yet they are the only evil tech giant at the moment (Microsoft has gotten a lot better the last few years imho).
The fact that Google gives the violation of their agreement as the reason doesn't mean it IS the real reason behind it. There are many other youtube apps (like MetroTube) that do the same thing, but they don't get removed. It's a fact that Google has been boycotting Microsoft for years. They blocked GMail syncing for Windows Phone devices, they disabled Google Maps for WP (it worked before, but then they just blocked all WP devices), and now they do it again.
Sure, you can argue that "well Android has majority market share so it's in microsoft's advantage to have apps in that platform!" - and you would be correct.
However, that doesn't excuse having the web views for Windows Phone on gmail and maps (and maybe youtube?) be significantly worse than those for iOS/Android. Like, the work has already been done - Google just does not redirect WP users to the "pretty" sites. If you manually enter in the iOS/Android URL on WP, it works fine. It's just not defaulted. And that's lame.
Exactly how long do you think, say, Viacom woulds tolerate a high-profile, name-brand YouTube app that blocked ads and supported video downloads? And what do you think Viacom would do to Google if Google's response to that app was turning a blind eye?
Crossposting my own comment from another thread.
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?
I'm sure if Microsoft merely removed the ability to download videos and restored ads, Google would not have any problems with it.
The fact that MetroTube is so successful disproves the conspiracy theory that Google is trying to prevent Windows Phone users from being able to use YouTube.
This isn't a "We don't like WP" issue, this is a "your app blatantly violates our ToS and we're not okay with that" issue.
You are entitled to your opinion, but I must say that quite a few people around here, me as an example, do not share it.
We still remember the ISO Office XML shenanigans, the vague Linux patent threats, the still ongoing Android patent extortion, the UEFI requirement - that's on par with Microsoft's old evil, imho.
Microsoft clearly knew this would be unacceptable, and obviously would have known Google would have to tell them to remove the app.
So it's clear that the whole thing is an exercise from Microsoft, I suspect, to paint more of the "evil Google" picture that they are working assiduously to establish. Now they can point to Google and say "look, everyone, Google is taking away your toys, they must be evil!".
The problem they may have is that this is pretty transparently unacceptable on their part, and even worse, it doesn't jive at all with their general stance on intellectual property (Android infringing on their patents, etc.) where they paint themselves as the good guy who always licenses IP and expects others to do the same.
And they would be right. It's not mutually exclusive that Microsoft is doing this evilly on purpose, and that Google is evilly holding back Youtube from Windows Phone on purpose.
You can can get away with this if you are a small team with a limited audience, but MS is either incompetent or has calculated this outcome.
What's interesting is what they don't say. They don't say that Google have refused to provide them this, or even that they asked Google for this.
Assuming that Google's complaint of "Prevents the display of advertisements in YouTube video playbacks" is a TOS violation, it looks to me that Microsoft violated their TOS first, and are only now trying to imply that Google are the bad guys.
But what are the long-term effects on the growth of what Microsoft really needs (a thriving third-party mobile development community)? I could be biased because of Google I/O's hype effect, but things like this only make me lean towards Android as my next platform to develop for (coming from iOS).
I agree with the definitional meaning of Microsoft's retaliation - large companies should work together to create amazing content (ie. cross-platform Youtube app) for their mutual users. As always, it's a shame to see immature rivalries come between progress.
50% of top windows8 (RT) paid apps are in Gross violation of Copyright/Trademarks (Mind you including microsoft's own Copyright/Trademarks).
Instead of cleaning up that mess and providing proper opportunities for legitimate developers, why is microsoft encouraging doing something by violating TOS of another major company?
There's no reason whatsoever Microsoft should comply to those ridiculous demands.
And it's awesome that Microsoft removed those YouTube antifeatures for users, they for once deserve to be thanked for the good they are doing.
Google is looking more and more like the evil one (although far less evil than Apple or Oracle).
At least one reason for each major media company Microsoft currently partners with (or wants to in the future)... They, after all, are the ones most invested in these particular YouTube anti-features. And should Microsoft stymie Google, I'd predict that they won't remain on the sidelines.
And this is why app stores - as implemented by Google, Microsoft and Apple - are evil. 'Bought' an app? Think again.
Evil involves intent, not capability. For example, a car can hurt or even kill someone, but it's not evil. Someone who intentionally and willfully runs down pedestrians with a car would, however, definitely qualify.
Here's how the three companies have used their kill switch:
- Microsoft has used their kill switch once to disable a pirated app
- As far as I'm aware, Apple has never used their kill switch, even for pirated apps or apps that were pulled for various reasons (scams, tethering apps, etc.)
- Google routinely uses its kill switch to remove malware and "practically useless"[1] apps
So the the real questions are: is using the kill switch to combat piracy evil? What about malware? "Useless" apps? What about not using the kill switch at all for any reason?
[1]: http://readwrite.com/2010/06/25/google_activates_android_kil...
This is ridiculous. Why would anyone expect a special TOS just for Microsoft?
> Allows users to download videos from YouTube
That was pretty cool, but I honestly don't need that. I can already download any video from anywhere online using Google Chrome and the curl trick.
> Prevents the display of advertisements in YouTube video playbacks
I never saw ads on the mobile web version of YouTube, but this could be a problem when Google wants to insert them.
> Plays videos that our partners have restricted from playback on certain platforms (e.g., mobile devices with limited feature sets)
This was great! I actually remember trying to play a video that worked on my laptop and failed on my phone. I just went back to that same video and it worked.
The overall mobile web experience of YouTube is terrible on my Windows phone (and on my iPhone). Since most of you guys are probably iPhone users here is an analogy. It's like trying to switch from a native iOS maps (Apple or Google made) client, to Googles web version of maps. Yeah it works and does everything, but the performance is crap compared to the native mobile application.
For a lot of people, it's not an option.
The fact is, Microsoft built a user-centric application, focusing on all the things a user might want to do. An application that treated youtube's servers exactly for what they were, servers, servers serving content. No different than browsers that have ad blocking extensions, or extensions to download videos, or whatever else a computer might want to do with data (did you know a smartphone is computer? Cool huh? ).
Microsoft made an application that put the user first. Finally. Even if this is just a PR stunt, even if they have the worst intentions, they did the right thing. If Google wants to contend this they can go suck on my freedom.
The proper response to this was: "Wow Microsoft, great app!" It doesn't MATTER what Microsoft's intentions were.
1. Do ad blockers remove ads from YouTube? 2. Do the people in support of Google's stance use ad blockers?
Is the word native the common term here?
http://i.imgur.com/LiUSpCy.png
Looks like the Google fans, employees and shareholders on HN with good karma can't let this story break on the day of Google I/O? And people accuse Microsoft of astroturfing! What is this then?
If PG does not want to stop this blatant and continuous moderator abuse, he might as well declare HN a Google and Linux fiefdom so that the rest of us using other platforms and who can think for ourselves and are not Microsoft haters can stay away. ]]]
Posted this story earlier and it got flagged off the front page.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5714520
Reposting my comment here:
This is the latest in a long saga. From a post from Microsoft in 2011:
First, in 2006 Google acquired YouTube—and since then it has put in place a growing number of technical measures to restrict competing search engines from properly accessing it for their search results. Without proper access to YouTube, Bing and other search engines cannot stand with Google on an equal footing in returning search results with links to YouTube videos and that, of course, drives more users away from competitors and to Google.
Second, in 2010 and again more recently, Google blocked Microsoft’s new Windows Phones from operating properly with YouTube. Google has enabled its own Android phones to access YouTube so that users can search for video categories, find favorites, see ratings, and so forth in the rich user interfaces offered by those phones. It’s done the same thing for the iPhones offered by Apple, which doesn’t offer a competing search service.
Unfortunately, Google has refused to allow Microsoft’s new Windows Phones to access this YouTube metadata in the same way that Android phones and iPhones do. As a result, Microsoft’s YouTube “app” on Windows Phones is basically just a browser displaying YouTube’s mobile Web site, without the rich functionality offered on competing phones. Microsoft is ready to release a high quality YouTube app for Windows Phone. We just need permission to access YouTube in the way that other phones already do, permission Google has refused to provide.
http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_on_the_issues/archive/2...
There is a Google YouTube app for iOS, though.
https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/getting-started#quo...
http://support.google.com/youtube/bin/answer.py?hl=en&an...
WP does not ban adding ads to apps.
If Google made a competing game console, would be interesting to see if they would have withheld it like they do on Windows Phone.
Microsoft has responded to the takedown notice.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5715889
(Edit: looks like that submission is getting flagged as well. I guess this story really isn't showing Google is good light if Google fans are in such heavy damage control mode. It looks like they have a veto on what appears on the HN front page. Look you may not like Microsoft and even its response but why try to bury a legitimate news item? Not enough Google I/O posts on front page? ).
"We’d be more than happy to include advertising but need Google to provide us access to the necessary APIs.
In light of Larry Page’s comments today calling for more interoperability and less negativity, we look forward to solving this matter together for our mutual customers."
I wonder what happens if Microsoft doesn't back down till they get access to the ads API, will Google file a lawsuit? Interesting times!
"It's perhaps notable that the YouTube app for Xbox DOES include support for ads, and has done since last year."
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/05/google-tells-microsof...
This like saying Google is not on equal footing with Bing on social media integration, because it doesn't get the type of API level that Bing gets from Facebook.
Does Google want to "maliciously" block Youtube from WP8? Yes. Does Facebook maliciously block Google from getting any of their deeper level API's? Yes.
So now can we also stop pretending Google owes anything to Microsoft? I wish the situation for all platforms was different, too, and there was a lot more collaboration between them. But I also understand why Google is doing this. It's retaliation for all the crap Microsoft has done against Google over the past few years, too - the anti-trust lawsuit, the Gmail ad, the DroidRage, the Scroogle, the patent license extortion from Android (and Chromebook) makers, and on and on.
So I can't exactly say I feel sorry for Microsoft, because they are not innocent, even though they try to play it like that in the media. But this situation will become worse for any user that isn't fully committed to one platform or another, and that's just the unfortunate reality of the tech war today. Maybe it will get better in a few years.
Also, lack of social media integration isn't that important a feature of search engines. Also it is likely that UbuntuOS/Jolla/FirefoxOS/Bada also get the same treatment from Google?
These days however, and speaking from a purely subjective perspective, Microsoft appears to be slightly softer and humbler, whilst Google under Page appears to be confident, maybe even aggressive and certainly increasingly ubiquitous. It's the last part that concerns me most.
Apple, Google and Microsoft however all pale by comparison when placed on the same scale as non-profit Mozilla Corp, in terms of openness and looking after our rights and freedoms.
Personally I'm somewhat of a bannerless citizen, but at least in theory, that's an organization that could receive my support.
I no longer believe those things, because they aren't true anymore (but they did used to be true).
I still use a lot of Google products and services (gmail, Nexus 4, google maps, search, ARM Chromebook, Go, etc) because I am more pragmatic than idealist, but now I view Google as being capable of being just as dicky as any other big company when it suits them, because that's how they've been behaving for the past couple of years.
I think it is unfortunate they don't make the APIs more equally available to all platforms, but I'm not going to start a riot or boycott them over it... they are just a big business being a big business, and yes, occasionally doing "evil" (for very first-world-problem definitions of "evil").
Additional copy & pasted rant:
"You can reverse engineer binary applications but you cannot reverse engineer the cloud. When Google deprecates a web service, Facebook eliminates an API, or Twitter imposes tougher API restrictions, all dependant services fall like dominoes. The weakest link in the chain is the cloud services that you can’t run or port anywhere: we no longer have control over the applications we use.
On the other hand if you want to run old applications from the Apple II, downloading an emulator solves the problem. Do you miss Borland Turbo Pascal 5.5? Install DOS on your i7 or run it in a virtual machine to achieve instantaneous happiness. Just don’t expect to take advantage of your quad core! Emulators are not created in a vacuum and reverse engineering is the key to emulating a complete platform. Reverse engineering is also very important to tackle complex issues in hardware and software virtualization. For example, you need reverse engineering skills to virtualize Internet Explorer 6 on Windows 7.
It seems odd now that Microsoft was prosecuted for engaging in monopolistic practices in the 90s. Apple and Google are currently abusing their market positions without much real criticism. Microsoft must be laughing because these new companies have launched platforms far more controlled than Microsoft’s in the 90s. Ironically, Microsoft is now doing the same thing with their mobile initiatives and Windows, which would have been illegal 20 years ago. All of the above practices are contrary to the hacker spirit."
Key, and very important points:
First - Microsoft really did have a, legally proven, Monopoly position in 1999 for desktop/laptop computing. It's hard for some of us to remember, particularly with the wealth of web-based computing in which the client really doesn't matter any more (Facebook works just fine from a Mac or Linux System) - not to mention the incredible growth of mobile (in which Microsoft has no traction). But in 1999, Microsoft had basically a monopoly role in the people's computing experience, and they then tried to leverage that monopoly to take over another market (web browsing) . They managed to squish Netscape like a little bug, but the Justice Department stepped in, and prevented them from continuing their illegal behavior [1].
Apple has a nice product, but they most certainly do not have a Monopoly.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp...
How many "little bugs" has Google squished with their Search? Granted they didn't get sued by DOJ because they were smarter (Google's Lobbying Budget: $25 Million During FTC Probe - http://thenextweb.com/google/2013/01/04/google-spend-25-mill... ) than Microsoft but with a 70% online market share they can destroy virtually any business or niche they want to.
All the extra stuff you see on Google Search now was done by other companies and most were destroyed during Search updates for having "spammy and shallow content." If you ask Google why the clutter? The answer is something like "Because users love that content...blah blah" But users hated it when others did it and Google didn't make money on it. Of course.
Every time I search for reviews of a laptop, say, I get page after page of autogenerated sites that have not one iota of content to call their own, but still manage to rank highly for "<model> reviews". They're the main ones that have been yelling about Google screwing them.
What we watched today at Google I/O was really impressive. Not from the technology side but from the business/velocity/applied-research perspective. I don't want to stop that kind of innovation but leave space to a more healthy web (APIs).
Umm, yes you can. It's all series of HTTP calls. Problem is not with reverse engineering, it's getting people to use your new reverse-engineered service with zero other users to provide content. You can reverse engineer Youtube and have all its features and API, you just don't get all the content and community in it.
One of the core ethical purposes of reverse engineering is to leave the door open for competition.
Just sayin'...
You forgot bingiton.com
Last time when Google was intentionally blocking Google maps and then deprecated ActiveSync on Windows Phone someone posted this funny line(which seems quite true given how much of the world's crowdsourced video content is on YouTube):
"Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful, except on Windows Phone".
Also, HN's post about Microsoft's reply is getting heavily flaggged as well.
Microsoft was known evil, now google has joined the party too.
Well, there is GoogleTV, but it's doing way worse than Windows Phone, so they don't care.
Well, obviously this is a false flag attack by paid Microsoft astroturfers and shills! /s :)
Lots of volunteers.
I think an interesting project would be to reverse engineer the flag scoring and karma decay, scrape and offer an "unskewed HN" and something that shows most flagged topics or articles (maybe a flag weighted word cloud for last x days idk).
I'd love to hear pg comment on if Google stories are really abused, mis-modded or flagged as you imply.
I have also noticed that Googlers aren't fans of saying "Disclaimer: I work for Google" but go straight into praising Google's Product A and Feature B as if they had no bias.
"Google is good and Microsoft is evil" is getting a little tiring and IMO is no longer true. Google will do almost anything for a quick buck:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/jan/13/google-keny... http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405311190478740457652... http://money.cnn.com/2010/08/05/technology/google_verizon_ne...
Just imagine what may hide in their black box algorithms as Google claims fairness an unbiased results.
So, either your post is considered bad, deserving downvotes, or there is a conspiracy. I'd go for the simple explanation.
Me too. Considering the flagging of bad-for-Google stories it makes sense.
That's what you meant for the "simple explanation" right?
FYI: I don't work for Google. So its not just google employees that disagree with you.
That's an opinion, but I no longer fall for Google's kool aid...and yes, there's some boomerang from having drunk it earlier on.
FYI: I don't work for Google. So its not just google employees that disagree with you.
The good thing is that I am not looking to get noticed, get funded or being hired here so I truly say what's in my mind. I am 100% sure that many [insert corp name here] employees disagree with me on virtually every topic.
Why does everyone who's despondent towards Google act like the company is some sort of abusive ex-boyfriend?
Google claimed a lot of things but generally the theme was "We're nice, ethical...trust us with monopoly power, we'll be considerate...blah blah" and people believed it, helping them get even more market share. IMO they seriously abused that power especially in the past 2-3 years, only to fatten their wallet http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2011/10/google... at the expense of websites that provide the content for Google Search. It's not merely academic, well meaning small businesses lost everything they had, and then some.
If I /we were stupid to believe that, and if "Google doesn't owe you any traffic," fine but we sure have the right to voice out our opinions.
Here's a good summary of some of Google's questionable practices around search (disclaimer: I wrote this for a class in college): http://thechronicle.github.io/blog/2012/06/01/dont-be-evil/
Google are an "us vs them" company now not a "great products" company and that's why they do these things like downvoting rings that lack integrity. That's just the tip of the iceberg, and it's going to get a lot worse.
No. Because they abused a monopoly position hurting competition, therefore artificially inflating prices and preventing the kind of progress we see now in non-PC segments that are not suffocated by them.
Also, for extorting every Android handset maker with a bogus (and secret) list of patents.
They are now using the money they make advertising on that search system (if you check their Q10 they don't actually get much money from third party adsense websites: first party inventory dominates) in order to build large numbers of "engh, good enough but not great" services that are impossible to compete against because Google just gives them away for free or even operates them at a loss... it really isn't that different. They are even now starting to "bundle" things together with their search platform (G+) to directly leverage their position to propel other products.
This is especially clear as what really screwed Microsoft was trying to make certain everyone had access to a web browser that could itself be used as an application platform rather than having to pay license fees to a company (Netscape, if this isn't clear) that had such a large web usage marketshare that they were able to run roughshod over the W3 (to the point where their mailing list sometimes described Microsoft as the open hero that will save them; Microsoft even was providing their DTDs for public review, which impressed the crowd).
Netscape used this position to make up features we still hate like presentation-oriented markup, to hold back the original CSS attempts by being unwilling to implement them, and to add tons of proprietary features to their JavaScript engine that they considered a killer feature that others had to bug-for-bug emulate. I mean: I look at the situation and find it surprising that anyone wouldn't think it isn't the exact same story playing out a second (arguably, even a third) time ("you either die a hero or live long enough to become the villian", etc.).
Netscape did try to use their position as temporary de-facto standard to bully there way through, tough they were not very successful at it.
* Releasing DTDs for review: the were very slow on this compared to MS. Some of that was abusing their position (as the incumbent de-facto standard they had some control, and keeping what they were doing internal for as long as they could forced competitors to either guess (resulting in conflicting behaviours some of which we still fight with today) or wait and implement late). Equally though I think some of it was just their business culture: they were not open by default, they did not want to release for comments until they considered it finished, and so forth. MS had little choice but to be open and play ball with the community: they'd have just been ignored for longer otherwise.
* "Netscape used this position to make up features we still hate like presentation-oriented markup": That is the frontier development thing. "Hey!, Look at this!, Isn't it cool!". Everyone was doing it, you just remember Netscape for it more because the legacy of some of their experiments/toys is still with us day-to-day.
* MS overtaking them on CSS support, particularly positioning, once it became a strong contender for the way to go was more to do with them struggling generally at the time. The application was being killed commercially by the free Internet Explorer which had at least got to the point of being "good enough" beyond being free, they were losing money server-side too due to competition there that they were not able to fight off, and the application itself had become somewhat complex and bug ridden (IIRC the 4.x series was chronically unstable, at least on Windows, until at least 4.0.8) so implementing anything new (and implementing it well) took more effort than they could afford to throw at it. Their alternative (layers) was implemented first and they paid the "jumped first, guessed the market wrong" price heavily: having to support their own idea for backwards compatibility and find time to implement the one that won more general acceptance.
* Most of the problems with JS cause by Netscape are from its beginnings: it was rushed to market. Most of the rest were them trying to keep ahead of the slow standards process - everyone else was doing that too.
> you either die a hero or live long enough to become the villian
Exactly. Well, almost.
Netscape were far from perfect and did (try to) abuse their position a bit, but if my memory is accurate (which it often isn't that far back, so have salt pinches at the ready) most of what they did wrong was due to bad business, process, and design decisions and being unwilling to backtrack on technical decisions that didn't work out so well (for reasons of compatibility: they too kept maintaining/reimplementing their old bugs so as to not alienate people with code relying on them) rather then concentrated deliberate malice.
My personal belief is that the extent to which this is true for Netscape it is also true for Microsoft. (To be clear, I can also make these same kinds of arguments for Google: I state this explicitly as I really am not trying to paint Microsoft as "good" and Google as "bad"; however, I might come off as that while attempting to equate them, due to the preconceived notions that some people may have while reading the below "apologies".)
* They cared extensively about things like backwards compatibility, causing them to not like to change things once they built them; but they cared about being pioneers, so they often implemented things (such as CSS and XSL/T) when they were in their infancy, and got semi-locked in to details that weren't quite right (the box model was not some IE abomination: that's how the CSS box model was originally defined and it shifted underneath them).
* A lot of the things we didn't like about IE6 weren't actually intrinsic to IE6: it was because Microsoft stopped working on IE6 and it stagnated. Some people attribute this to them having "won", but that frankly makes a lot less sense than "they had their ass handed to them with tons of sanctions and other limitations, after a massive multi-year legal--not technical--battle with Netscape, that made working on browsers risky and emotionally challenging".
* They took on Sun and lost with Visual J++, which hobbled them for a while in their push to switch to using high-level language development, and led them to build the massive .NET ecosystem that is much less compatible with anyone else. (The only thing Microsoft did in J++ was add backwards compatibility for COM objects and build a Win32 GUI binding: otherwise, we would likely have ended up in a future where everything else was built on Java.)
This, by the way, I find to be a really interesting parallel; Sun was often on the sidelines, but has actually been a major player in all of these stories: they were already in bed with Netscape when they licensed the term "Java" to be used with "JavaScript", and then that furthered into the "Alliance" after AOL purchased Netscape; they then went on to pull legal challenges on the corruption of Java by first Microsoft (against whom they won, with the audience cheering them on) and now recently Google (against whom they lost, to the audiences' equal delight). The fact that so many people were willing to back Google screwing with Java while being willing to trounce Microsoft for it confuses me to no end: it seems to just come down to emotional bias.
> Do you have any links furthering your explanation about Netscape? Typically the story is told much, much differently, and your allegations pique my interest here very much.
Yes, actually: I have tons. I did a bunch of research for another comment I was going to leave to someone else a few months ago, and then decided "engh, not important, maybe will write an article about it some day"; here is that comment:
<< begin content I was working on a few months ago >>
So, I was also a web developer back in the late 90's: we used to go around to area businesses trying to explain to them what the Internet was (as they would, of course, never have heard of it), and ended up working on the first websites for such companies as our local bank, newspaper, and real-estate agency. I was doing this as early as 1996.
You know what? I have pretty clear memories of Netscape doing exactly these things everyone always gets angry at Microsoft over. Netscape, a company that sold a commercial web browser, was embarking on an embrace-and-extend campaign against HTML itself, and using the resulting influence to get bundled from ISPs as a default part of the Internet experience.
At the time, Internet Explorer existed, but was a joke: no one used it. Instead, sources reported that 70% of the people browsing the Internet were running Netscape Navigator.
> Netscape Navigator 2.0 is a standard on the Web; according to some surveys, it is used by 70 percent of all Web surfers.
-- Web Based Programming Tutorials http://www.webbasedprogramming.com/Special-Edition-Using-Jav...
What this meant is that when Netscape released new features that were specific to their browser, a lot of developers didn't think twice about using them.
> Even though unauthorized, the Netscape extensions have become commonly excepted tags and are used in many Web documents. <CENTER>...</CENTER> The Center tags is one of the most popular Netscape extensions (see the HTML Center Tag below).
-- An Educator's Introduction to HTML http://literacy.kent.edu/Midwest/HTML/netscape.htm
Yes: even CENTER was a Netscape-specific extension. In fact, many of the tags that have long been considered "deprecated" and which many web designers consider cringe-worthy due to being "presentation-only", were added by Netscape and only adopted into the specifications because their usage was already too widespread. Netscape was considered fun to "bash" on the W3C mailing lists.
> Netscape seems to have conveniently ignored certain HTML tags which they don't want to use. They talk all sweet and innocent "Netscape remains committed to supporting HTML 3.0" But we all know that that's bullshit.
-- Dan Delaney http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-html/1996Mar/0175.ht...
> Netscape is young and horny. Its market, by and large, does not understand what the possibilities are, does not understand what it's being denied by choosing Netscape exclusively, and does not yet care to learn. This is not a sitation where one can reasonably expect technological maturity.
-- Scheckie Irons http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-html/1996Mar/0185.ht...
> Instead, we get kludgey frames which practically trap the user into a page, <FONT> that we have to put everywhere (as opposed to putting it in one style sheet file), and image maps that are not text-compatible on the same page.
-- Charles Peyton Taylor http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-html/1996Mar/0197.ht...
Note carefully the mention of style sheets: that is where the W3C was going at the time with their HTML 3.0, and Netscape couldn't wait. If you go back to books published at the time about HTML development, this was a well-known tradeoff: Netscape-specific extensions were designed to have you to embed styling information directly into the HTML.
> Many of Netscape's HTML extensions differ from the proposed HTML 3.0 standard in one big, important way. Netscape has implemented many page formatting options as custom HTML tags; HTML 3.0 proposes to handle formatting via a technique called style sheets.
-- Special Edition Using HTML, 2nd Edition http://www.fishmech.net/netscape/docs/sehtml/15.htm
Microsoft, in comparison, was actually looking pretty good. The developers were on the mailing list, and were even submitting the DTD's that they were using for validation of HTML for public comment before they released new versions. The people on the mailing list at the time really appreciated this, and made their opinions known publicly.
> Excellent! It's really encouraging to see a vendor supplying a DTD for a change.
-- Gerald Oskoboiny http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-html/1996Mar/0139.ht...
> Excellent! OK: all you folks who told me that H* would freeze over before vendors issued SGML DTDs as documentation, I TOLD YOU SO. And to all the folks that fought the good fight with me, aren't you glad you did?
-- Daniel W. Connolly http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-html/1996Mar/0144.ht...
One person, in the same e-mail where they were early complaining about some Netscape-specific HTML features, even seemed to (begrudgingly) think that Microsoft might offer some hope in this battle against Netscape to maintain control of Internet standards.
> Might Microsoft come to the rescue in order to eat Netscape's lunch? After checking the Microsoft homepage, I see that they claim to be supporting W3C tables, but even then they are adding new attributes. Still, at least they say they'll support style sheets, and that they've concluded the agreement to add Java.
-- Charles Peyton Taylor http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-html/1996Mar/0197.ht...
In fact, when we look back at Microsoft's Internet Explorer, the main things we hate are actually not places where they failed to adopt standards or built their own tools: it is when they adopted a standard very early, and then the standard changed out from underneath them. Stylesheets are a great example of this: the "IE box model" was in the standard when MS released.
You then mention ActiveX, but Netscape was pulling the same stunts with Java: their proprietary LiveScript features (which later became JavaScript) were designed to allow seamless back/forth communication with the Java VM (also not an open standard, to note). I remember working on websites at the time, and you'd find import statements in JavaScript code referencing out to Java classes.
When you then found Microsoft building JScript, a language compatible with the base JavaScript specification, that was tightly integrated to an alternative non-open system called ActiveX, it really wasn't surprising, nor was it in any way different from Netscape: both companies now had browsers that had a language compatible with a base (Netscape-defined, btw) specification that had deep integration with an external full programming environment.
Netscape had also added a feature allowing for Netscape-specific plugins which was becoming more and more popular. I remember there being more than a small handful of plugins that people reasonably expected you to have, to do everything from audio to animation.
<< I had not finished past this point, and hadn't finished sourcing the statements regarding LiveScript. I will probably write a longer fully-sourced article at some point soon, now that my time has been freed up from evasi0n's wave being largely over and Android Substrate finally being released. >>
It's not like users can't access Youtube on Windows Phones either; as far as I know, Google doesn't block its user agent.
If Google has widespread rings of employees dedicated to flagging anti-Google stories on Hacker News, do you honestly think that not one single person would have exposed it by now? That all people involved- including ex employees, most likely- would never talk?
Even the other story about Microsoft's response is getting flagged and is far down the front page for its points.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5715889
What's your explanation for this constant flagging of Microsoft related stories or anti-Google ones?
Read through this thread for examples for many more stories getting flagged off the front page.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5716010
HN rankings graph showing abnormal and sudden dips.
http://hnrankings.info/5715168/
HN rankings graph showing low rank for a long time inspite of a lot of upvotes.
Occam's razor, you know. Not everything is a conspiracy.
As a Google employee: yes. We don't like this any more than anyone else does. We want to _earn_ positive feedback. The idea of Google employees flagging (or being told to flag!) stories about Google they don't like is laughable to me.
Whether employees of theirs ever indulged in things like astroturfing was irrelevant because their official actions were so upsetting.
From you profile. You don't think that maybe this bias is showing through in some of your comments?
Anyway, bed time is almost here.
Unless I missed something, your OP was one big complaint about biases.
Downvoting affects directly the visibility of a message and this should not be based on opinion.
You seem to be splitting hairs here. The OP complained about the bias of others but didn't like it when he had his own biases pointed out.
I'm suspicious of any claim that says "votes" somehow have more "power" than words. Words, opinions and ideas all have power too.
You shouldn't ever be downvoted for expressing an opposing position.
There are thousands of employees at Google. Maybe there are just are a lot of people reading HN during the day.