recoiledsnake

And I don't work for Microsoft, never worked for them or any affiliates nor own their stock or ever owned it and the closest that I know I was ever to any MS employee was when I was interviewing in Seattle at Amazon for a C++/Linux position.

Now, can we get on with the discussion instead of trying to derail it by ad hominem attacks?

This thread says otherwise.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5714681

Wait, so Google is dropping XMPP support because Outlook.com is supporting it to allow Gtalk users to chat on Outlook.com, so in order to perpetuate the GMail/GTalk lock-in by caging the Gtalk chat users to GMail, they're dropping standards support and killing access to all XMPP clients in existence including non-Microsoft ones? And they announce this right when Microsoft spent all the time and effort to allow Outlook.com users to chat with Gtalk friends and is rolling out that feature? Am I right? Someone tell me I am wrong!

That sounds unbelievable, coming from the supposedly open company even though it's coming on the heels of them trying lock out millions of Windows Phone users from Youtube by sending a C&D takedown on the app.

I guess open standards don't work when you're the guy trying to lock in users. If Google had a lock-in on Office products, looks like they will ditch "open data" and "open standards" in a heartbeat. They should change their policy to "open when it's convenient for us to flog it for PR purposes, else closed, oh and please store all your office documents on our cloud, we make it really convenient.".

This is not Open vs. Closed anymore, this is Corporations vs. Individuals, except for Mozilla which is becoming less powerful because Google uses its ad dollars to bundle Chrome with Flash, Acrobat and Java updates by default thereby reducing Firefox's share and has the nice side effect of reducing Google's payments to Mozilla for searches.

And Web DRM? Of course it's coming because IE, Chrome and Safari are going to be supporting it fully with 80% marketshare and people will blame Firefox if Netflix doesn't work in it and recommend you switch to Chrome to see movies! iOS, Android and Windows Phone, BBOS will add support for 100% tablet and phone support for the DRM. Firefox and Opera are powerless to stop it. We have already seen this play out with th h.264 HTML5 video support in Chrome fiasco when Google said it would drop H.264 from Chrome but did not and Mozilla was left holding the short end of the stick and had to recently had to eat crow and add support for H264. The web is owned by the corporates, not individuals anymore, there was some hope when Firefox was at 40%, not anymore. And we all willingly gave them the power by believing in "open" and "do no evil" and switching in droves.

I can picture Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Google, Twitter, Amazon, Netflix etc executives sitting at a bar and giving toast to each other and laughing while we whine and debate fruitlessly with vitriol on these forums. All their stock valuations are up recently!

Lots of posters report that the Youtube mobile site and phone apps don't show ads so I don't know what the fuss is.

Also, if WP allegedly has such low adoption that Google doesnt feel the need to make an app, how much revenue can the WP app hurt?

Vimeo and Yahoo mail have WP apps but Youtube and Gmail don't. Go figure.

I don't have an issue with them pulling it, but they did it suddenly and gave MS very less time for a workaround and increased the time only after public shaming.

MS implemented CardDAV and CalDAV standards as Google wanted, and as part of spring cleaning round 2, those are deprecated and replaced with their own proprietary new API!

http://www.zdnet.com/google-do-what-you-want-with-reader-but...

See this thread for more details

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5716010

Agreed, I also think its just overzealous fans acting on their own. By the way, Microsoft's response is stuck on the 2nd page despite getting a ton of upvotes

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5715889

Okay, I agree, Apple and Google rock and Microsoft sucks.

So how is all that related to the article idea's and the OPs point about the FUD on HN about .NET dying? Is .NET dying because Apple makes more money selling iDevices than Microsoft's Dev tools?

Lets be upfront here about the topic being discussed, is it "Where is .NET headed?" or is it "Does MS make less money than its competitors and therefore sucks?"

>So, they made in a year something around what Apple makes every quarter just from iPad sales? That's the rosy sign MS's "Servers and Tools" business is doing OK?

That's their server and tools revenue in a quarter, not a year. In your rush to compare it with an irrelevant and totally unrelated figure you've taken leave of facts and reality.

Why not compare the yearly figure now with how much Exxon makes by selling gas and then conclude the Server and Tools division is not doing okay? I mean that's what you want to conclude right?

Thanks for the post, but have to disgree on some points. the differences aren't small, they're quite big when you realize that ranking makes a huge difference to how many people see it and how many more new votes it gets, especially if it goes off the front page.

Adding more data for perusal. HN rankings charts show abnormal behavior too, because all the complaining led to more upvotes or it would've fallen off the front page.

http://hnrankings.info/5715168/

http://hnrankings.info/5715889/

Will post more screenshots of downranked submissions tomorrow, maybe we can figure out exactly what's happening.

Note that the complaint is not about lack of upvotes, it's about people going out of their way to use their flagging powers which is meant only for spam links.

Wow, they just had to just send an email to their instead of pleading with Google for three years for API access. Microsoft sure is stupid!

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.

>If Microsoft wrote a TOS-compliant YouTube app and put it in their app store, but it was written in a way that bumped up against the quota limits, I'm sure they and Google could work out some way to grant them more quota.

MS has been requesting API access since three years, so I think there was no amicable resolution and MS was forced to do this.

From their statement:

"We’d be more than happy to include advertising but need Google to provide us access to the necessary APIs," says a Microsoft spokesperson.

>You realize that if ads are required by the TOS, but you don't have the ability to include ads, that it doesn't mean it's just okay to ignore the TOS and distribute the app anyway?

Microsoft developers didn't have to read and accept the TOS to access Youtube videos. Perhaps they're trying the legal precedent of the equivalent of 'clean room reverse engineering".

Is it legal for Mozilla to distribute Adblock on their site which is a program that disables Youtube and Google ads and hurts content creators?

Would Mozilla be forced to remove it from https://addons.mozilla.org if Google sends a C&D to them?

>It sounds like it's just not even technically legal for MS to distribute their YouTube app in its current state.

So what? Google can sue them for billions and win and stop all Windows Phone users from easy access to YouTube videos despite their stated mission of "Organize the world's information and make it accessible to everyone".

Not sure why you're so worried about Microsoft's finances, they have 75 billion in the bank and some pretty good lawyers. No wonder they snuck in a "download video" button too. The WP Youtube app is the best Youtube app on mobile platforms because of that.

Windows Phone has tens of millions of users and YT is a really popular app so it would hit the quota limit real quick and get banned.

https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/getting-started#quo...

>I don't know if that's a valid extrapolation. I, for one, in all my working years have never met a Linux company that was interested in switching to .NET, but I met many that wanted it the other way around if they could only justify the upfront investment to convert the proprietary application stack.

Thanks for doing exactly what the OP requested commenters NOT to do.

From the OP post:

"Does anyone have real data related to ".NET is dying" other than idle conjecture, short sighted "frog in the well" anectodes which sound like they're written and voted up by people sipping on a latte on a Macbook in a Starbucks in Silicon Valley?

Again, any hard data will be appreciated that shows .NET is dying instead of the same paragraph upon paragraph of opinion and no links, references or data, we have enough HN comments of that already."

The world is much much much bigger than what you saw in all your working years. That's why personal anecdotes are quite worthless and we need real numbers.

So many paragraphs of speculation and no links or references from people living in their own little bubble and mistaking it for the world.

The flagging ability is removed if you do a lot of flagging in a very short time, like the poster who didn't like all Steve Jobs posts on front page when he passed away and flagged them all and lost his flagging ability.

Microsoft related articles don't show up that frequently to cause that, especially because people don't even bother submitting them because 1. they don't get upvotes(because of HN's makeup) 2. If they happen to get upvotes they're flagged by overzealous Microsoft haters.

Anyway, if you think I am misguided, what's the alternative explanation of this and every other instance of such things? I am genuinely curious.

This article: http://i.imgur.com/FbkMiCI.png

Just a few more instances:

http://i.imgur.com/ADMcanz.png

http://i.imgur.com/Yg5kXJb.png

http://i.imgur.com/FbkMiCI.png

Why would someone want to flag a review of the Surface Pro review from Anandtech of all places? Note that a new Chromebook announcement was #1 for all day on that day.

Want to see more instances of such mod abuse?

A user complaining about this happening to Apple related stories as well.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4850128

This is a regular occurrence on Microsoft related stories which don't show it in a bad light and anti-Google stories.

See #26 on the front page:

26.Where Is .Net Headed? (odetocode.com)

5 points by wubbfindel 44 minutes ago | 1 comment

How come that story is on the front page but this one with triple the points and submitted almost at the exact same time isn't?

35. Microsoft responds to YouTube demands, 'more than happy' to include ads (theverge.com)

14 points by CloudNine 48 minutes ago | 9 comments

Even benign Surface Pro reviews are flagged by the high-karma Gods, can't have them hurting Chromebook sales.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4849814

Looks like this 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? Are there not enough Google I/O posts related stories topping the the front page?

Can anyone who flagged this and the other related stories come out and tell us why they feel the need to abuse their moderator privileges?

From the HN guidelines:

"If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.)"

Looks like PG didn't guess that people with good karma will want to abuse it to bury stories they don't want others to see in such a constant way.

>The issue is that the app is not displaying ads, which is against the TOS.

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!

>I haven't ported any of my own apps to Win Phone either - what's the point when nobody is using it?

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?!

In a number of comments on HN I get the impression that people believe Google to be a more "open" and less evil company and thus should be trusted more but here you're comparing them to other companies considered "evil" and saying it's okay for Google to behave the same way.

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?

>If you actually read the article, you'd see the issue is not dislike of WP. The issue is that Microsoft is stripping off the ads that fund Youtube and its content, in violation the YouTube ToS. It also includes a button that allows people to download videos which is, again, a violation of the ToS.

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?

There's an ongoing discussion in this thread.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5714639

>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?

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.

Carriers are uneasy about giving more control to Google, Apple and Microsoft. They want to keep them at bay by going with the OEMs who are much less likely to challenge them on their turf.

Nokia's chief said that carriers were less keen on Windows Phone because of Microsoft acquiring Skype.

http://www.businessinsider.com/nokias-ceo-says-carriers-hate...

Does Google make any money by selling this or is it just Samsung? Does this mean no new Nexus phone for Google I/O?

And Motorola continues to bleed a ton of money.

Story seems to be getting flagged and is going down the front page.

Looks like some HN folks with good karma can't stand a Microsoft story that is not super critical and bitching about them. Those stay on the front page for days.

http://i.imgur.com/wFN21wY.png

Even announcements are not spared. Can anyone who flagged this post care to tell us why? I suspect the answer is "lol M$'.