Microsoft TechNet Blogs

From Microsoft's antitrust complaint from last year. http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_on_the_issues/archive/2011/03/30/adding-our-voice-to-concerns-about-search-in-europe.aspx

First, in 2006 Google acquired YouTube—and since then it has put in place a growing number of technical measures to restrict competing search engines from properly accessing it for their search results. Without proper access to YouTube, Bing and other search engines cannot stand with Google on an equal footing in returning search results with links to YouTube videos and that, of course, drives more users away from competitors and to Google.

Second, in 2010 and again more recently, Google blocked Microsoft’s new Windows Phones from operating properly with YouTube. Google has enabled its own Android phones to access YouTube so that users can search for video categories, find favorites, see ratings, and so forth in the rich user interfaces offered by those phones. It’s done the same thing for the iPhones offered by Apple, which doesn’t offer a competing search service.

Unfortunately, Google has refused to allow Microsoft’s new Windows Phones to access this YouTube metadata in the same way that Android phones and iPhones do. As a result, Microsoft’s YouTube “app” on Windows Phones is basically just a browser displaying YouTube’s mobile Web site, without the rich functionality offered on competing phones. Microsoft is ready to release a high quality YouTube app for Windows Phone. We just need…

Latest in a long saga.

From a post from Microsoft in 2011:

First, in 2006 Google acquired YouTube—and since then it has put in place a growing number of technical measures to restrict competing search engines from properly accessing it for their search results. Without proper access to YouTube, Bing and other search engines cannot stand with Google on an equal footing in returning search results with links to YouTube videos and that, of course, drives more users away from competitors and to Google.

Second, in 2010 and again more recently, Google blocked Microsoft’s new Windows Phones from operating properly with YouTube. Google has enabled its own Android phones to access YouTube so that users can search for video categories, find favorites, see ratings, and so forth in the rich user interfaces offered by those phones. It’s done the same thing for the iPhones offered by Apple, which doesn’t offer a competing search service.

Unfortunately, Google has refused to allow Microsoft’s new Windows Phones to access this YouTube metadata in the same way that Android phones and iPhones do. As a result, Microsoft’s YouTube “app” on Windows Phones is basically just a browser displaying YouTube’s mobile Web site, without the rich functionality offered on competing phones. Microsoft is ready to release a high quality YouTube app for Windows Phone. We just need permission to access YouTube in the way that other phones already do, permission Google has refused to…

"C++ instead of bare bones unsafe C" is C++ really much safer than C?

"an OOP ABI (COM)" you really think this sort of thing is super great and there's nothing like it on "UNIX clones"?

I have heard interesting things about windows async i/o syscalls, but as you'll see in another sub-thread, IIS still has a major component in the kernel, because the overall syscall overhead of windows is apparently somewhat high.

This wouldn't be the first time I've heard of super-fancy windows subsystem designs which in practice were sabotaged by just generally over-complicated implementations. I recall a blog post by Mark Russinovich around the time Vista came out about the new, quite advanced file copying algorithms: http://blogs.technet.com/b/markrussinovich/archive/2008/02/04/2826167.aspx - but that file copying performance was often significantly reduced when playing an mp3 file due to the "multimedia class scheduler" - http://superuser.com/questions/18600/107mb-s-network-file-copying-slowed-to-16-5mb-s-playing-local-media-files-w - either because i/o and execution priorities didn't actually work, or the engineer assigned to do this didn't know what he was doing and neither did anyone he worked with. Who knows?

This sort of thing is all over microsoft's stuff. Theoretically super advanced, in practice just over-complicated. It's closed source and hugely complicated, so we'll never really know why it doesn't work as well as it should.

A great blog post echoing the same sentiments (that no longer appears to be there):

If you have ever dealt with me directly as a customer, attended one of my presentations, or even simply stomached one of my diatribes in a casual, technical conversation, you have no doubt heard about one of my pet peeves (no, not “Tips –n- Tricks” – we’ll visit that another time) but the term “best practices.”

I loathe that term. I know we are guilty of it at Microsoft – so are just about every single technology-based organizations. In our ever-evolving industry, to put something down in print as THE ABSOLUTE BEST PRACTICES goes against the very nature of the word “practice.” It can seem arrogant. It implies way too much finality. It also can mean serious disruption when a practice changes. I work in a consulting practice. As products, regulations, politics, and trends change, so do our recommended practices. This is why I purposely try to use “under the current recommended practice” or simply just “current recommended practices.”

Source: http://blogs.technet.com/b/gladiatormsft/archive/2014/08/25/app-v-5-installing-to-the-pvad-don-t-do-it-yes-i-said-it.aspx

Google's comment: "We’re committed to providing users and creators with a great and consistent YouTube experience across devices, and we’ve been working with Microsoft to build a fully featured YouTube for Windows Phone app, based on HTML5. Unfortunately, Microsoft has not made the browser upgrades necessary to enable a fully-featured YouTube experience, and has instead re-released a YouTube app that violates our Terms of Service. It has been disabled. We value our broad developer community and therefore ask everyone to adhere to the same guidelines."[1]

Microsoft's responds by saying cooperation with Google has stalled because Google insists the app be built using HTML5, a technical restriction other mobile platforms are not held to.[2]

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[1]http://www.zdnet.com/why-is-google-blocking-the-new-youtube-app-for-windows-phone-7000019460/

[2] http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_on_the_issues/archive/2013/08/15/the-limits-of-google-s-openness.aspx

You and I are on the same page. What concerns me is that really the best work on securing core internals of the OS from long standing problems, such as strengthing LSASS and SAM against pass-the-hash with virtualized, isolated processing shielding and HW age I will be forced to it already. All the talk of Corona scares me, and not even CIS and the big players have guidance since MS has the new attitude of "just trust us already." Their announcing, even with Enterprise SKU, you cannot disable Windows Store, worries me. In my personal life, Windows is something I hardly ever use. But work and Windows 10, being shoved down into the deskop market, is scary. The Cred Guard stuff and improvements are wonderful, but their increasingly we're the cloud and you're the peon attitude also terrifies me.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/ash/archive/2016/03/02/windows-10-device-guard-and-credential-guard-demystified.aspx