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Comment by true_religion | Hacker News Reader

Not being evil doesn't mean that you're an angel incapable of doing harm. It just means you're not malicious.

It's the difference between a car accident, and murder by car.

And they are malicious. For instance they are forcing removal YouTube apps on WP by revoking their API keys, simply for being on the wrong OS. They also removed mail features out of the blue to hamper WP users. By malice they also make it as hard as possible to select which calendars to sync (they hide the option when the browser is on a WP) and force phones to use legacy google maps. Luckily Nokia's HERE is much better.

"simply for being on the wrong OS"?!?

I was under the impression that the youtube app was revoked because it displayed videos without the requisite ads. That is, Microsoft was using Google as an unpaid content-hosting service.

Not for lack of trying - Google and Microsoft would on-again off-again "work together" and suddenly the requirements would be different or the result would be insufficient. Most recently, they decided that the Windows Phone app must be an HTML5 application even though it isn't on iOS or Android. Microsoft expressed interest in using the advertising APIs to adhere to Google's requirements, but for whatever reason those were never made available.

The whole Terms of Service for YouTube is very anti open web - everything about it screams distinguishing between privileged and unprivileged user agents. Now, of course neither Google nor any other company is beholden to making their platform work on every platform, but these actions seem deliberate.

For more on this, look into the blocking of Google Maps on Windows Phone, which was based solely on the user agent string sent to Google's servers. Or look into the curious case of IE11 receiving a different search page on the date of Windows 8.1's general availability, making it appear as though the update "broke" Google. Curiously, for weeks before Windows 8.1's general availability people using pre-release versions and MSDN/Technet versions had no problems whatsoever.

It's not clearly deliberate, malicious evil, and I'm perpetually a fan of Hanlon's Razor; but it definitely gives me pause every time I hear another one of the stories of Google's interoperability with Windows and Windows Phone.

Took me a sec here to realize that WP = Windows Phone. I was checking my WordPress sites (the "other" WP) to see if they disabled my YouTube plugins, and thankfully no.

Yeah, Wikipedia didn't make sense, so I searched and thought WordPress, then finally figured it out.

Part of it is probably that I've only ever seen one person use one.

It's more like driving while typing on your phone and ignoring the road for 15-30 seconds at a time, causing a 40 car pileup of death, then claiming "whoops, sorry, just an accident."

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