I like iPad and iPhone as they are. Apple devices don't come with random crud from the third parties preinstalled. Windows computers have problematic things even in BIOSes: different software from companies that claim to "protect" your computer but can even provide remote access for third parties.
First, Windows 8 allows you to run whatever desktop apps you want, including third party antivirus software of your choice that have full access to the system.
Second, I haven't seen your argument made for iOS and Chromebooks which are much more locked down than Windows 8. Though one could argue that Chromebook doesn't need to have malware since everything is helpfully uploaded to the cloud.
If the third party antivirus software need to be approved by MS, then I can't run the software of my choice.
It might had been worth mentioned, I am not the first person to talk about liability issues regarding lockdown. I first heard it in a talk that described the iPhone.
It's funny how Windows 8 is singled out as if other Windows versions are any better. Windows 7 can be securely used till 2020? That's the cut off date for updates from MS. The same MS that the article says " For the user there is simply no way to tell what exactly Microsoft does to their system through remote updates."
The above is true of Apple and Google, but it is glossed over.
First, I fail to see any relevance or technical info about what the TPM or trusted boot has to do with the issue at hand.
If anything they should be warning people about using Chromebooks where everything is uploaded to the cloud by default, same with Google Apps and Skydrive. Or Outlook.com and Gmail.
Oh, also be careful about Ubuntu, Shuttleworth said he has root on your machines.
In short, this is a rambling article full of technical sounding gibberish designed to get semi technical folks riled up with scary sounding buzzwords instead of actually educating people.
I'm assuming you're not a computer, have you tried using context clues to figure out what the author might have meant? This isn't Reddit, we don't need grammar Nazis or joke threads here.
The sentence looks like the author started a thought but didn't finish it. I doubt moocowduckquack was taking a cheap shot at the grammar so much as wondering if the author didn't finish the thought.
wasn't a grammar issue, it was that the middle of the sentence seemed to be missing and that it was confusing enough that I thought it useful to point out, and now it is fixed and makes sense to people, yayy :)
Windows 8 features MS's version of Apple-style walled garden app infrastructure, which is in turn protected by hardware TPM. Windows 7 can be installed without this hardware support, but will utilize it when available (by securing signed drivers). Windows 8 doesn't require TPM (yet), Windows 9 has been in development since before the release of 7. TPM support was introduced as a core component in Vista, iirc.
>The Windows Phone YouTube app would be the first significant (1) phone OS to have a YouTube app not made by Google, there are no others to compare Google's behavior on for fairness. This is the first event of its kind.
It's also the only significant phone OS that doesn't ship with Google search as the default.
"At Google we believe that open systems win. They lead to more innovation, value, and freedom of choice for consumers, and a vibrant, profitable, and competitive ecosystem for businesses. Many companies will claim roughly the same thing since they know that declaring themselves to be open is both good for their brand and completely without risk. After all, in our industry there is no clear definition of what open really means. It is a Rashomon-like term: highly subjective and vitally important."
..
"To understand our position in more detail, it helps to start with the assertion that open systems win. This is counter-intuitive to the traditionally trained MBA who is taught to generate a sustainable competitive advantage by creating a closed system, making it popular, then milking it through the product life cycle. The conventional wisdom goes that companies should lock in customers to lock out competitors."
...
"To understand our position in more detail, it helps to start with the assertion that open systems win. This is counter-intuitive to the traditionally trained MBA who is taught to generate a sustainable competitive advantage by creating a closed system, making it popular, then milking it through the product life cycle. The conventional wisdom goes that companies should lock in customers to lock out competitors. There are different tactical approaches — razor companies make the razor cheap and the blades expensive, while the old IBM made the mainframes expensive and the software ... expensive too. Either way, a well-managed closed system can deliver plenty of profits. They can also deliver well-designed products in the short run — the iPod and iPhone being the obvious examples — but eventually innovation in a closed system tends towards being incremental at best (is a four blade razor really that much better than a three blade one?) because the whole point is to preserve the status quo. Complacency is the hallmark of any closed system. If you don't have to work that hard to keep your customers, you won't."
...
"In other words, Google's future depends on the Internet staying an open system, and our advocacy of open will grow the web for everyone - including Google."
I'm all in agreement on the hypocrisy of Google's "open" bullshit train but isn't the central issue here that the gd brand mark for YouTube is simply not free to use?
I think Google is within their rights to put whatever limits they want in that area, even unreasonable ones.
And while 2/3 of HN is happy to swallow the open kool aid, last I checked MS wore big boy pants and surely they can do better than crying about their big unfair rival on their blog.
That article is funny, if you click on Googe Data Protocol, the cornerstone example for openness, you get "Warning: Most newer Google APIs are not Google Data APIs."
>The only thing that's clear is that Microsoft is using its customers as pawns in a PR game against google. I know what my response to that would have been: No more MS products.
Wait a minute, isn't Google using YouTube content providers and advertisers as pawns in this game to hurt Windows Phone?
Windows Phone holds about 3.5% marketshare, and by refusing to make an official app (with ads) or allowing Microsoft's version which shows ads and because of the degraded experience of the mobile site which discourages people from searching, watching related videos etc. , they're hurting revenues of content providers to help Android.
So if you're a content provider, you can and will be used as a stick to further Google's selfish interests even if the actions hurt you.
Sounds like a reason for "No more Google products" if anything.
> Wait a minute, isn't Google using YouTube content providers and advertisers as pawns in this game to hurt Windows Phone?
No, they're just refusing to give Microsoft preferential treatment. Microsoft can write a native app as long as they comply with Google's terms. There are at least 5 different YouTube native apps in the iOS store last I checked, and at least 5 in the Android Play store. See "Jasmine" on iOS for a great example.
If Microsoft is so bad at writing software that they can't follow simple terms and conditions, maybe they should hire the Jasmine guy.
> allowing Microsoft's version which shows ads
That would require them to develop a new API for microsoft, and maintain it. Why would they do that, when they already have a perfectly good API that Microsoft refuses to use?
> because of the degraded experience of the mobile site which discourages people from searching, watching related videos etc. , they're hurting revenues of content providers to help Android.
This is an assertion without proof, which personally I find implausible.
> Sounds like a reason for "No more Google products" if anything.
You are welcome to stop using Google products. Especially, you should stop using YouTube. Please do. Please. Blacklist the youtube.com website (which works perfectly well on WP) so you don't go there accidentally.
"At Google we believe that open systems win. They lead to more innovation, value, and freedom of choice for consumers, and a vibrant, profitable, and competitive ecosystem for businesses. Many companies will claim roughly the same thing since they know that declaring themselves to be open is both good for their brand and completely without risk. After all, in our industry there is no clear definition of what open really means. It is a Rashomon-like term: highly subjective and vitally important."
It's hard to read that and then say Google is not being hypocritical here.
Requiring someone to play by the rules to use the data isn't being not open. The data is accessible, and you can use it, provided you follow the rules. And there really only seems to be one rule that Microsoft keeps breaking (and even admitting to breaking), which is using an HTML5 video tag to wrap the video in.
If Microsoft can't put a simple web frame in their own application and have only an iframe, video tag, or whatever it is that Google wants to display the video, Microsoft has a problem.
The data is open, and free for anyone to use, provided they follow the rules. Microsoft doesn't want to follow one simple rule. One. Simple. Rule.
A simple rule that degrades the experience that the official app doesn't follow.
It's apparently not a very pleasant rule if the largest API consumer doesn't follow it.
It's not 'open' if some users get the good API and some users get the bad API.
And it makes you sound ridiculous to put so much emphasis on 'one simple rule'. It's very easy for rules to be both simple and unfair at the same time. How about '$500 entry fee for short people'.
> A simple rule that degrades the experience that the official app doesn't follow.
And that degrades the experience how? Just because Google doesn't use the same API (nor are they required to) doesn't mean everyone else gets a poorer experience. There are a number of unofficial YouTube clients for iOS and Android, and they all use the public API.
Again (and I say again because I replied to another one of your comments), if Microsoft doesn't have a web frame for their mobile apps, and has to make the entire app web-based, how is that Google's fault? They didn't create a (in that case, because if it's not the case, I have no comment) sub-par API for their mobile OS.
> It's apparently not a very pleasant rule if the largest API consumer doesn't follow it.
Again, how so? They don't need to follow the rule because they know when their advertising is going to change, nobody else does. The overhead involved in allowing everyone to do things the same way Google does is too high compared to just saying use a web view. Would you want to monitor every use of the API and make sure everyone was up to date by a certain point of time?
> It's not 'open' if some users get the good API and some users get the bad API.
How is the public API bad? Because it requires a frame? What's bad about that?
Also, really, no users are using a "good" or "bad" API, everyone who isn't the producer has access to the same API. All users get your so-called "bad" API.
> And it makes you sound ridiculous to put so much emphasis on 'one simple rule'. It's very easy for rules to be both simple and unfair at the same time. How about '$500 entry fee for short people'.
But how is this rule unfair? You've yet to convince me that the rule is unfair. This argument only works if everyone agrees that the rule is unfair. I don't see any preference for anyone other than the producer. Everyone who doesn't manage the entire infrastructure is given the same treatment as the other people not managing the system.
> A simple rule that degrades the experience that the official app doesn't follow.
How does that make Google un-open?
> It's apparently not a very pleasant rule if the largest API consumer doesn't follow it.
The largest API consumer is also the API provider. They can (and should, and do) iterate faster than a stable API they provide to others. That's almost always the case.
> It's not 'open' if some users get the good API and some users get the bad API.
All users get the same API, but provider is using a different API (which may, and does, change every other day). And it's perfectly open. Openness does NOT mean everyone gets to be on equal footing! Google can shutter youtube tomorrow, but Microsoft can't, which is always going to be the case.
Open is about having access to the data at all, under reasonable terms and conditions, that Microsoft refuses to follow.
> It's very easy for rules to be both simple and unfair at the same time. How about '$500 entry fee for short people'.
It sounds even more ridiculous to compare "use a standard HTML5 iframe section provided to you" to "special fee for short people".
History shows that indeed, Microsoft and standards don't mix well. But that's hardly a Google problem. Microsoft could have spent a tenth of the energy (and money, and goodwill) in this case, and just hired someone who knows what they are doing (e.g. the guy who wrote Jasmine for iOS, which provides an experience way better than the official client, using only this 'one simple rule')
>Google has obligations (both legal and moral) to both the content providers of YouTube and to the organisations who buy adverts on it. In order to 'not be evil' they have to take actions that respect these obligations.
Aren't content providers losing revenue because Google refuses to make a Youtube App for Windows Phone in an effort to cripple it?
The latest numbers peg WP's marketshare at 3 to 10% in various countries. Assuming a one to one equivalence of users and views, content providers are losing ~3 to 10% of revenue because of Google's dithering on this to help Android.
I would assume both content providers and ad buyers would benefit if Google makes an official Youtube app or allowed Microsoft's version with ads in it. Am I wrong?
If Google wanted to fulfill it's obligations to content providers and advertisers, they would do what Amazon does with Kindle and have a proper app on every platform that lets them publish one.
The fact that they don't shows that the reason is all about Android and not about Youtube.
> Aren't content providers losing revenue because Google refuses to make a Youtube App for Windows Phone?
If those Windows Phone users want to watch said content, they can do so in their web browser.
> The latest numbers peg WP's marketshare at 3 to 10% in various countries. Assuming a one to one equivalence of users and views, content providers are losing ~3 to 10% of revenue because of Google's dithering on this
That assumes that those people will not watch that movie anyway (on a desktop, on a friend's phone, or on the WP using the browser) - which is a completely bogus assumption.
> I would assume both content providers and ad buyers would benefit if Google makes an official Youtube app or allowed Microsoft's version with ads in it. Am I wrong?
The would also benefit if Google gave a free android phone to all WP users so they can watch it. So? Google is not a charity. They set terms and conditions for implementing a YouTube app. There are tens of youtube apps for both iphone and android that abide these rules (not talking about Google's official apps here! see e.g. Jasmine on iOS).
Microsoft insists on not observing the terms and conditions, and then blames google.
> they would do what Amazon does with Kindle and have a proper app on every platform that lets them publish one.
There's no kindle app for Linux. Or the Raspberry Pi. Or the the BeagleBone Black. Or the Chumby. or my smart Vizio TV. And yes, I run all these platforms at home. Does that mean Amazon doesn't care about Kindle content? (incidentally, the Chumby, Vizio and Linux all have native apps for YouTube, and each of them has sold more units than the Windows Phone).
> The fact that they don't shows that the reason is all about Android and not about Youtube.
Next time, you should start with the facts and work out to a logical conclusion, rather than starting with a conclusion you want, and trying to fit the facts into it.
>If those Windows Phone users want to watch said content, they can do so in their web browser.
>That assumes that those people will not watch that movie anyway (on a desktop, on a friend's phone, or on the WP using the browser) - which is a completely bogus assumption.
The degraded experience causes many folks to leave the web app instead of going on to watch more videos, especially related ones. Also assuming that fickle users with low attention span are going to remember to search for the video later on on their other devices is also a bogus assumption.
Lack of an officially sanctioned solution definitely hurts content producers.
>(incidentally, the Chumby, Vizio and Linux all have native apps for YouTube, and each of them has sold more units than the Windows Phone).
Just Nokia seems to have sold 20 million phones in the past few quarters.
Anyway, if Windows Phone has very few users, how are the content producers hurt if they watch videos without ads?
How are the same number of WP users simultaneously not worth monetizing by YouTube enough to make an official app and at the same time hurt their revenues if not monetized by being shown ads to?
Even Vimeo with its puny marketshare and revenues compared to Youtube has developed an official Windows Phone app!
> Just Nokia seems to have sold 20 million phones in the past few quarters.
Ok. Nintendo has sold more than 100 million Wii consoles. It has no kindle app. It has a YouTube app. Your comparison to Amazon is still bogus.
> How are the same number of WP users simultaneously not worth monetizing by YouTube enough to make an official app and at the same time hurt their revenues if not monetized by being shown ads to?
I'm sorry, we appear to be living in different planets.
Google is under no obligation whatsoever to give preferential treatment to Microsoft, regardless of how much money it costs or earns them. And as Microsoft is still bullying Google's Android partners with patent threats, Google refuses to give Microsoft a preferential treatment. It's so simple. And yet, it seems so hard for many people on this thread to understand.
>Google is under no obligation whatsoever to give preferential treatment to Microsoft, regardless of how much money it costs or earns them. And as Microsoft is still bullying Google's Android partners with patent threats, Google refuses to give Microsoft a preferential treatment. It's so simple. And yet, it seems so hard for many people on this thread to understand.
And if YouTube's content providers and users are hurt by this, so be it?
