Microsoft Says Google Trying To Undermine Windows Phone

First time accepted submitter Bent Spoke writes "In a bit of delicious irony, Microsoft laments Google is not playing fair by excluding access to meta-data on YouTube, preventing the development of the kind of powerful app readily available on Android. From the article: 'In a blog post on Wednesday, Microsoft VP and deputy general counsel Dave Heiner said the software giant has spent two years trying to get a first-class YouTube app running on Windows Phone, but to no avail, thanks to the Chocolate Factory's stonewalling. "YouTube apps on the Android and Apple platforms were two of the most downloaded mobile applications in 2012, according to recent news reports," Heiner wrote. "Yet Google still refuses to allow Windows Phone users to have the same access to YouTube that Android and Apple customers enjoy."'"

Irony?

[clark0r]

If Google are in fact doing this, then I can fully understand why Microsoft would be justified to complain. However given Microsoft's past tactics in trying to undermine the competition, perhaps they should eat humble pie. Anti-competitive browser tactics through bundling, non-compliant standards (IE6), deliberately making it hard for SAMBA to integrate with AD, these are just two things that have personally turned me against Microsoft in the past. More recently, launching Twitter campaigns to try and spread Android FUD and on the other complaining that Google aren't playing fair? Take a look in the mirror Microsoft.

Re:What goes around comes around

[MurukeshM]

I believe you mean 'karma'.

Re:Nothing to celebrate if it's true

[gigaherz]

I'm an owner of a Nokia Lumia 710 (Windows Phone 7.x) and you can browse and play back youtube videos just fine in the browser, without the need of any app. And in fact there are apps that let you browse youtube, but they may not have full permission from google to do it. What they are complaining about is access to the metadata content for the videos, not the playback itself.

Re:The joys of proprietary software

[21mhz]

Don't bother, there is at least one [windowsphone.com] application that proves the GP is full of shit.

Re:Lawyer?

[Nerdfest]

Have you not been paying attention to how the 'game' is now played? It's now more about suing people than actually making products that people *want* to use.

Re:Nothing to celebrate if it's true

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a JSON API for all of YouTube. The issue is not that APIs aren't available, but that Google appear to be selectively blocking some users from accessing it (or all of it). Which sucks for all of us. APIs should be non-discriminatory (other than usage caps of course).

Re:Chocolate Factory??

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a term used by The Register as a token of their ongoing hatred of Google. In the context of Willy Wonka, it's a sort of backhanded compliment. It implies their resentment of any suspiciously clever software being brewed in Mountain View. Your average El Reg staffer, if he has any tech chops at all, is about the level of a low to midrange MCSE. Take their OpEds with a handful of salt.

Re:Fair for the goose...

[jbernardo]

- Skydrive, the more or less standard way to get stuff in and out of Windows Phones, doesn't implement WebDAV in a open manner, making it difficult to use with Linux or BSD;

I'll give you that. Meanwhile, enjoy your Google Drive over WebDAV... oh, you don't have that either.

No, but I can easily access the files I have on my Android phone, using either USB mass storage or standard MTP. No need to use a cloud service. And, an added advantage over WP7.x (never used 8) is that other cloud services work, with automatic synchronization of folders. On WP7.x you need to copy files by hand, at least with Dropbox and Box.

Windows Phone 8 does support standard MTP? USB mass storage is an anachronysm.

I haven't tried yet WP8, but 7.x doesn't support standard MTP, only a hacked non-compatible Microsoft variant.

BTW, USB mass storage isn't an anachronism, it is just the easiest way to transfer things; in Linux it just works, in windows it just works. MTP has too many quirks and one of my peeves with the recent android releases is that it is used by default, forcing one to resort to workarounds to get the device working in mass storage mode.

Skype doesn't work on Android

[Anonymous Coward]

And Skype doesn't work on Android, and contrary to djsmiley's comment yesterday, a trivial search shows it doesn't work, these have been reported many times.

This is nothing to do with Google, it's Microsoft that can't deliver that. Microsoft have not delivered even a basic youtube app, they could simply parse the webpage data, but they don't. I use things like MediaShare that does provide a youtube interface without all the incompetent whining.

Copied from my posts yesterday:

1. Video is upside down, if you rotate the device, then both the camera and video playback are upside down, but the other person does see you right way up in that case. Do a search [skype upside down video] and you'll see this has been reported to them lots of times.
2. Video is landscape only & very fuzzy, but the camera video is not fuzzy, probably the compression?
3. Audio plays back very very quietly even with full volume.
4. Lag, lots of it. (I've been told they route all connections through their own servers in the US, which explains the new found lag).
5. Occasionally Skype gets in a state where the Android tablet won't go into hibernation until you force-kill Skype. This really sucks down the battery juice.
6. Call receive ring is very quiet, even with full volume.
7. It doesn't handle timezones properly. It is 9am, a new event happened at 2am, it is not listed in the 'Today' section, it is listed in the 'Some time ago' section. What is listed in the 'TODAY' section is from 'YESTERDAY' at 18:48! (Does it get the timezone from somewhere other than the phone? Because that won't work now, the phone travels, desk computers don't, you can't assume a fixed timezone per user now).

The beginning...

[XB-70]

So, let me get this straight: Windows 8 uses Unified Extensible Firmware Interface to block the installation of any other operating system. Microsoft Office ONLY runs (properly) on Apple and Windows, it has taken the Samba team some 15 years to figure out Active Directory, MS Office files are not 100% ODF compliant (and probably never will be), SQLServer only runs on Windows machines etc. etc.

the bottom line is this: because of all the above, the migration away from this closed-shop monolith is happening - and the RATE at which it's happening is ramping up extremely quickly.

In short, we are witnessing the beginning of the end of the monopoly.

Re:Fair for the goose...

[lofoforabr]

Just as a sidenote, Android Jelly Bean axes USB Mass Storage, in favor of MTP.

The main problem with block device level access is that you can't access it from 2 places simultaneously, so it means the filesystem must be unmounted from the phone to be mounted on the PC.

Yes, USB Mass Storage support is everywhere, and getting MTP to work isn't as easy, but I guess it will get better fast.

Re:Nothing to celebrate if it's true

[Anonymous Coward]

YouTube is not a monopoly? Really?

Yes, really.

(a) There are many other sites where you can upload and view videos - Vimeo springs to mind, for one
(b) There is no particular reason to continue using YouTube rather than other sites. The only lock-in they have is that they are popular and fairly reliable.

There is a big difference between a successful operation which is used by most people, and a monopoly. Don't conflate the two. Things aren't considered monopolies just because you say "Really?" in a sarcastic tone while failing to give any substantive reason why.

Google are NOT doing the same

[Anonymous Coward]

Except Google are not doing the same. I thought there was some meta data missing (the keywords text), but when I checked the youtube webpage headers, no, Youtube puts it in the keywords header field! It's right there, grab a webpage and take a look.

I see Bing already scrapes the description data, for some reason they don't index the keywords data, but they should, youtube keywords data is the data that users enter with their videos, not SEO spam.

I see the Views Count is right there on the webpage, so they can even get the viewing rank if they want. It's even in a span labelled
class="watch-view-count"

So Microsoft gets *all* the metadata for the video, including all the stuff the user enters, description, keywords, views etc. and they currently use part of it already in Bing.

IMHO, it's just incompetence. They just don't seem to be able to do *anything* these days. I remember the Microsoft whose products could be guaranteed to be technically excellent, and I look at the modern day Microsoft with despair.

Their stuff is garbage, they have 100 times the programmers, yet they don't seem to be able to do anything.

Re:Fair for the goose...

[jcdr]

Android Jelly Bean axes USB Mass Storage

False claim, sorry.

I have a Nexus S updated to Jelly Bean 4.1.2 and it happily support USB Mass Storage:

lsusb:
Bus 001 Device 019: ID 18d1:4e22 Google Inc. Nexus S

dmesg:
[1109159.988681] usb 1-1.1.4.1: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 19
[1109160.081288] usb 1-1.1.4.1: New USB device found, idVendor=18d1, idProduct=4e22
[1109160.081293] usb 1-1.1.4.1: New USB device strings: Mfr=2, Product=3, SerialNumber=4
[1109160.081295] usb 1-1.1.4.1: Product: Nexus S
[1109160.081297] usb 1-1.1.4.1: Manufacturer: samsung
[1109160.081298] usb 1-1.1.4.1: SerialNumber:
[1109160.081446] usb 1-1.1.4.1: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
[1109160.083930] scsi12 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
[1109160.084139] usb-storage: device found at 19
[1109160.084141] usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning
[1109165.084680] usb-storage: device scan complete
[1109165.085272] scsi 12:0:0:0: Direct-Access Google File-CD Gadget 0000 PQ: 0 ANSI: 2
[1109165.088506] sd 12:0:0:0: [sde] Attached SCSI removable disk
[1109274.036890] sd 12:0:0:0: [sde] 27957215 512-byte logical blocks: (14.3 GB/13.3 GiB)
[1109274.037598] sd 12:0:0:0: [sde] Assuming drive cache: write through

Re:Fair for the goose...

[jrumney]

The removal happened in 4.2 (which is also confusing called Jelly Bean).

Re:Google are NOT doing the same

[mabhatter654]

Actually, Google has an API registered developers are supposed to use. If you don't use the API, but screen scraping, the periodically mess with the pages to break you.

Google did the same thing to Apple... And Apple PAYS Google big bucks for API access. But Google kept withholding features from Apple's developer API toolbox so Android would look better. Apple's fix was to stop making apps themselves using Google's APIs at all. That way Google can make the App. Google can access the OS like a normal app developer (no more favors) and Apple gets out of paying a six figure sum every month! Google owns those services... Let Google develop the apps!

So the question is: can Microsoft drop its attempts at accessing Google's sites and raise enough suffering that Google writes an App for Windows 8 Mobile? Ha, ha, ha....

Re:Fair for the goose...

[Missing.Matter]

http://i.imgur.com/2Zp0G.jpg [imgur.com]

Need any more proof? Best part is I took the screenshot on the Ubuntu machine, moved it onto the phone via drag and drop, then uploaded it to imgur using an app.

Also, it is very amusing to me that you imply my post is a shill, when all I'm doing is pointing out *factual errors* you somehow managed to get modded up as informative. I can manage my Lumia 920 just fine on my Ubuntu machines. By all means though, keep plugging your ears.