Peter Kafka

Recent Posts by Peter Kafka

YouTube and Xbox Still Working Together Just Fine. YouTube and Windows Phone Still Not Working Together at All.

xbox one youtube appAn update from the weird world of Microsoft-Google relations: Microsoft and Google relations remain weird.

The specifics: Google’s YouTube and Microsoft’s gaming group have created a new YouTube app for Xbox One, Microsoft’s new console. That isn’t surprising, since YouTube and Microsoft had collaborated on an app for Xbox One’s predecessor, Xbox 360.

The only reason it’s worth noting at all — Microsoft has a lot of people making apps for the Xbox One — is that Microsoft and Google still haven’t figured out a way to get a YouTube app on Microsoft’s Windows Phones.

The companies have had an ongoing dispute which doesn’t make any sense to anyone outside of Redmond and Mountain View, and baffles many people who do work at those places.

The short version is that Google has shut down Microsoft’s attempt to build its own mobile YouTube app twice this year, and right now the Windows Phones remain app-less, though Windows Phone users can still watch YouTube via their Web browsers.

So to sum up: Microsoft and Google are perfectly capable of working together. Except when they can’t.

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I think the NSA has a job to do and we need the NSA. But as (physicist) Robert Oppenheimer said, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and argue about what to do about it only after you’ve had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”

— Phil Zimmerman, PGP inventor and Silent Circle co-founder, in an interview with Om Malik