Comment by XCabbage
6 years ago
The behaviour that your co-workers claim Google engaged in sounds pretty exactly like the AMD-Intel antitrust case where AMD alleged that Intel's C compiler was deliberately crippling performance on AMD processors to help Intel's processors compete. If true, Microsoft should sue Google over it - not just out of raw corporate self-interest, but because this sort of conduct is evil and should be stamped out.
If this case hasn't already been run up to Microsoft's lawyers, start running it up to them. You'll be doing the world a service.
What will Microsoft gain if they Win? Nothing. Google has the upper hand in public image. Microsoft is still evil outside of Dev Circles. And IE did some ass moves as well in IE6 era, think about the PR mess this would lead.
It is not the best time to strike now, once the timing is right, I am sure they will.
"Microsoft is still evil outside of Dev Circles"
TBH, I consider Google much more evil than Microsoft, in or outside of Dev Circles. Microsoft dropped the evil baton and Google picked it up and sprinted away.
I wonder whose circles are those, most non-technical people I know doesn't care less about evil, good or whatever.
Google will continue to have the upper hand in public image until stuff like that happens. Yes, this would be a PR challenge, but one MS might even be able to spin in a way they can benefit from...
Agree.
What Microsoft gain after Windows Phone YouTube app case? Nothing. Google successfully fucked up Microsoft.
There are dev circles where Microsoft isn't evil? I've been a Unix/Linux dev for thirty years so maybe I'm not keeping up, but the general view was that if Microsoft had a platform we needed to target it was because it made us money and we assumed we'd eventually get burned - which nearly every time we did.
And I've worked for Google in the past, but their main issue has always been that they change a lot which makes them a moving target which is annoying in its own way.
Microsoft earned its public image and while it's made nicer noises recently it's not an organisation that fills me with trust.
> "What will Microsoft gain if they Win?"
Uh, money? It might not exactly be a noble incentive for a lawsuit, but it's sure as hell an incentive, isn't it?
I wonder what sort of information Google might dredge up during discovery that Microsoft wouldn't want to see the light of day. I'm no lawyer/accountant, so I don't know what amount of money would be worth that risk.
With a lot of legal issues, sometimes the only winning move is not to play.
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"What will Microsoft gain if they Win? Nothing. "
They'll get a more level playing field.
CEO's generally don't order this stuff to happen. More often it's a director, manager, VP or whatever that's just really aggressive. Possibly the CEO knew or not.
When a company gets bloodied for a pile of money, they generally have to own up to it, which makes them look bad (by they way, these things do have a cumulative effect) - but more importantly, they have to at very least 'go through the motions' of getting staff to 'not do this stuff'.
So they have 'training' and 'oversight' etc.. However ingrained it is into behaviour (or even a single rotten apple) the likelihood of recursion goes down.
For example - if an inner legal team gets some responsibility for oversight on these issues, they can make life difficult for managers on these things.
I worked at a Fortune 50 that was sued by a patent troll, and it seriously and fundamentally changed internal culture to the point wherein we needed lawyers involved in everything, it was really bad. Obviously a negative example.
But especially Microsoft has enough $ to drag Google into court, they should do it.
That said: I'll bet $100 that MS might be doing some tricky things of their own anyhow.
Microsoft and Google exist in a bit of a cold war. They don't want to destroy each other in court. You can't just take free shots and not expect a response.
Well, to some degree I don't know that edge and IE aren't regarded with significant disdain within dev circles. They are certainly the source of 90% of the exceptional/poly/ponyfill/hotfix logic I end up shipping. Firefox, chrome, safari, opera all work the first time, IE is generally the odd duck.
Fascinating. I wonder what the counter-argument would be; that a website isn't software, perhaps? That argument could be sufficiently argued apart by equating manually downloaded/installed software with code that's manually downloaded (GET / host: youtube.com) and run in a browser context.
I'd be curious to see how likely Microsoft would be to follow this approach rather than to just stick to using Blink... as they've already decided to do.
The counter arguments are a) broken rendering in your browser does not dictate how my websites have to be, and b) since when is Google a monopoly on standardized HTML web video?
Google could start responding to YouTube requests with binary streams of gibberish if they want, MS would only have standing to sue as a content creator and advertiser on YouTube.
If Google is reverse engineering other browsers optimization paths and putting out content that is disagreeable to that optimization, that's possibly unfortunate but not illegal.
a) A broken reference C compiler don't dictate how a different C compiler might act -- in reference to the case which Intel lost.
b) since Google's browser became the defacto standard browser thanks to Edge switching engines, hence the thread. The standard doesn't really matter anymore; Google makes most of them now as a matter of course anyway.
Your comment is only good in theory.
In practice, Google won the browser wars and can dictate whatever they want to.
Microsoft got tired and the market segment was already extremely small, so there was not much to gain from fighting Google.
It's unfortunate because now we are all stuck with Google.
AMP is the next step of dominance for Google.