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.
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.
>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."
>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?
"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.
>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!
>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.
>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.
>because it's pretty obvious that you'll end up with a bigger market share if you sell 10 different flavors of the same thing compared to a company which only sells one.
So Blackberry needs to make 20 different models and they can beat Samsung? That doesn't make much sense.
That's a lot of blanket statements states as if they were the truth.
>Office 365 and Hosted Exchange are not competitors to Google Apps, they're poor competitors to Office and Exchange.
Uhh, why not?
>Azure is in no way a competitor to AWS/EC2 - it's more a competitor to Digital Ocean in terms of scale, and Digital Ocean is outperforming it completely.
Again, reference?
>You need to try and view the situation objectively if you want to understand why the MS share price is diving
Share price is diving? As compared to what? If you read the "article" you can see that the share price was ~28 just three months ago and today it closed at more than $31.
> ..and all your customers are hopping ship.
I am completely lost with the extreme hyperbole here.
To me it looks like most of the issue is with storing information in the cloud rather than natively running programs.
Is there any indication that software running on the client is at risk? The article goes to great hyperbole but unless you're using Skydrive, I don't see how Office files are at risk with the recent revelations.
Not that they aren't, it's just that I didn't see any information that they are.
I don't think storing information in the cloud using FOSS software is going to magically protect your information.
E.g. How does using Thunderbird to access Gmail afford greater protection than using Outlook to access Gmail?