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Blame Microsoft. They could have opened EAS up, or supported the open DAV standards from day one, like Apple did. Apparently, they knew since last summer, and still no patch? Pathetic.

They brought this unto themselves - and I use Gmail on my 8X.

EAS is open and documented.

EAS is not open. To use it, you need to pay royalties for the associated patents.

Would you argue that 3G, LTE, and WiFi are not open standards?

I think you're confusing "FRAND" standards and "open standards". You've listed examples of FRAND standards - they're open to use, provided you pay all the associated costs. RFCs, or many (but not all!) standards from the IEEE, are examples of truly open standards: they are both openly published for you to create your own implementation, and you do not need to pay for the use of the standard.

Which is why I asked if he considered the above standards to be examples of "open" standards. I am well aware of the difference, but I am of the opinion that the differences don't disqualify those standards from being "open".

Open doesn't mean there is zero cost associated with the use of the standard. If you're limiting open standards to only those who are royalty free, then you end up with very little standards (and in fact would be arguing that W3C standards like CSS are not open).

From Microsoft's own national technology officer:


"Let's look at what an open standard means: 'open' refers to it being royalty-free, while 'standard' means a technology approved by formalised committees that are open to participation by all interested parties and operate on a consensus basis. An open standard is publicly available, and developed, approved and maintained via a collaborative and consensus driven process."

Under Microsoft's own definition EAS is not open (or much of a standard really).

3G, LTE and WiFI are developer in an open way. They are not called open because you can get documentation.

Just like you can't call Android development an open process, you can't call EAS protocol an open standard.

Microsoft would need to let other people make contributions/comments in the development process of EAS.

Really, the only thing that would relate to patents in this case is if Microsoft had them undisclosed. Not all standards require a FRAND commitment(SD Association's exFAT is an example), but development has to be open to external contribution. That is what open stands for in open standards.

Edited 2013-01-22 07:52 UTC

You raise good points. Do you agree/disagree on royalties disqualifying a standard from being "open"?

If EAS were developed in the open, with community participation, but still had essential patents disclosed (and licensed reasonably*), would you consider it open?

* reasonable licensing doesn't necessarily imply FRAND, though it helps, obviously.

Yes, royalties disqualify technology from being open, especially if we are talking in the context of the Web. Open means also free to use including in open source / community implementations which can't pay any royalties.

Edited 2013-01-22 08:57 UTC

FRAND obligations and reasonable licensing with Microsoft giving up exclusive control over the protocol would not necessarily imply that the standard is open or closed.

Currently EAS is much more accessible than any GSM standard. Microsoft is giving out licenses easily and they are not expensive.

IMHO It's more a cost shift (the political one also make sense),
Google want to cut cost by removing support to EAS and then stop paying Microsoft a license.
While Microsoft bear the cost of developing and deploying a DAV client for its phone.
As deep as Google pocket are I can't blame them for cutting some corner to make more money.

Depending on when in the product cycle Google notified them, they could've had too little time to do it without severely impacting QA.

Microsoft did it to themselves. Implementing support for *DAV should have been a no brainer from the start, and not simply because of Google. These are open, royalty-free standards that are used by a multitude of servers both corporate and otherwise. Of course, that's probably why they didn't do it. They probably assumed they could throw their weight around if they held off, since most major services also supported EAS. What Microsoft has so far failed to learn, even though it's been plain as day from the get go, is that this is not a market they can bully by refusing to implement an open standard. They have no weight to throw around in the mobile space, and they've just lost the first battle. I've nothing against Microsoft products, but they need to change tactics mighty quick if they don't want Windows Phone to become irrelevant within the next two years. Here's to hoping that being essentially left with no choice but to implement *DAV wakes them up a bit, as I'd like to see Windows Phone give some healthy competition to the big two.

You can still get EAS access, you just need to pay for it. While I am not a fan of Google's move, it isn't like you are completely high and dry. You just have to move to a paid google apps account, $50/year/user

Slightly off topic, but I think if they support the DAV standards they will support it across their user products

*Outlook.com calendar (maybe why it has yet to be updated)
*Outlook app
*Mail app in Win8 + RT

However I Don't think they will include it as part of exchange. Exchange is simply a brilliant product and keeping it distinct has the dual effect of enticing new users to its many benefits and keeping them locked in once they switch.

(I have used a number of options professionally and Exchange was so easy, powerful and well supported it became my favourite)

Lack of support for open standards in Exchange server hinders interoperability as much as the lack of support for them in MS client programs. I.e. for example you can't sync your calendar client which works through CalDav with Exchange server. It is especially a problem in corporate environments which are commonly stuck in depending on Microsoft products.

Edited 2013-01-21 22:32 UTC

The problem is that ActiveSync generates income for MS and allows them to exclude competitors, and DAV generates no direct income for MS. Also, they lose control over who connects to their systems so they have little interest in supporting it.

The *DAV suite is actually very nice, and in some ways better than Microsoft's alternative.

I believe more people criticize IMAP (rightly so) for not having a true push solution.

What's wrong with IMAP IDLE?

It isn't true push.

It still accomplishes the same goal - removes the burden of the constant polling from the server. Somewhat similar to how BOSH is used for XMPP. Surely full duplex communication is preferable, that's why WebSockets were designed for web servers. Are there any efforts for such communication in e-mail protocols? ActiveSync is irrelevant, since it's not an open protocol. So what else?

I'm unsure, but it is part of my issue with this hatchet they're taking to EAS. Without a suitable solution in place, it is irresponsible to reduce consumer functionality. I wish Google was a little more pragmatic.

EAS is proprietary, from an end-user point of view it results in lock-in to a single supplier, and introduces requirement for the consumer to have to pay royalties. To retain such a standard as the only means of access is to reduce consumer functionality. To get rid of such a lock-in to a proprietary pay-per-access "standard" is by far the best thing to happen, from a consumer perspective.

I put the word "standard" in italics here, in relation to EAS, because a true standard is mean to enable inter-operability of different products. See here for a definition:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_standard
"A software standard is a standard, protocol, or other common format of a document, file, or data transfer accepted and used by one or more software developers while working on one or more than one computer programs. Software standards enable interoperability between different programs created by different developers."

EAS constrains consumers to MS products only. If anything, it is an anti-standard.

This is a self-evident truth. How could you have possibly got it so backwards?

I don't really think it is the case. People use EAS because it is the best solution. The people I know that interact with it on a daily basis swear by it.

I find it backwards to complain about something, but offer up no alternative which replicates its functionality. There is no equivalent to EAS. It is the best at what it does.

That is all I am saying.

You have it backwards. Microsoft licenses their standard for implementation by third parties. Are you really saying that Google uses Exchange as the back end for GMail (Or Yahoo, etc.)?

EAS clearly meets your standard definition as it is widely supported by most mobile operating systems as well as major service providers. In reality, CalDAV and CardDAV are not nearly as widely adopted. As I mentioned last time this came up Google themselves do not support it in Android yet.

Now please tell me how is the consumer impacted negatively here? (First look up the definition of consumer, vs customer)

Did the deprecation of EAS on free Google services make it impossible to use Outlook.com or other services that provide the same functionality?

I was wondering when you'd show up. No, not impossible, just inconvenient.

Everything can be worked around, but jut telling people to switch to Outlook.com is the wrong answer.

Google either needed to relent or Microsoft needed to implement DAV (which it looks like they're doing). Telling people to migrate all of their data over somewhere else over a political decision is stupid.

Microsoft will side step OpenGL in the following ways:

1) Windows (up to 7):
DirectX is king on Windows. Huge titles are written in DirectX. There is an extensive catalog and many, many years of accumulated legacy code which uses DirectX.

Key questions to ask:
- How many games use enough middleware to make them rendering platform agnostic?
- How many developer studios go DirectX first vs OpenGL first? (I go into this a bit below in the Xbox section)

2) Windows 8 and the Windows Store
The Windows Store supports DirectX 11.1 and as such, porting a lot of Windows 7 apps is now a viable option. You will begin to see DirectX apps move to the Windows Store.

I believe that in the next year, you'll see unbelievable growth in the Windows Store. That will cause pressure on Windows Phone and even on Xbox ISVs to share code between the platforms (assuming Microsoft can get their ducks in a row w.r.t indie development on the 360 which is a mess at the moment)

3) Xbox
Xbox supports DirectX and there are a lot of big name games written using DirectX. Yes, I understand some of these (more so than maybe on the PC) are also running on OpenGL, but it is often an afterthought. In my experience, I've seen a lot more low quality ports to the PS3 rather than the other way around.

It doesn't seem to me, at least, that a large amounts of studios are using OpenGL first. Again, maybe I'm wrong.

4) Windows Phone 8
Windows Phone 8 now supports native code and DirectX. In addition, the Windows Phone 8 port of WinRT enables massive amounts of code sharing between Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8.

Windows Phone has traditionally had a good game selection, with this, I expect Windows Store DirectX apps to be ported to Windows Phone 8.

5) Developer Preference
Most people I've run into that use DirectX, don't exactly seem to hate it. Nor have I seen a lot of developers lamenting the fact that they lose out on cross platform support, because that story isn't really coherent yet on Linux and to a lesser extent, OSX.


Some caveats:
I have not taken a hard enough look at iOS, Android, and other platforms that use OpenGL to know if there is enough there to tip the scales.

I'm not convinced its a sure thing for DirectX, but this seems to me the plausible strategy that Microsoft is employing.


There is a lot of noise about how Microsoft has put XAML and the WinRT (and even Metro) everywhere, and to an extent, they have.

However, the one platform that is unquestionable ubiquitous on Microsoft platforms now is DirectX. This is an extremely valuable proposition for developers, and I think it stands a good chance of boosting DirectX.

Edited 2013-01-22 04:04 UTC

Yes, there is no doubt that Microsoft has placed Direct3D 11 at the heart of Windows 8 (a trend that started with Windows Vista and is now virtually complete). And this is the only graphics API they want to support, with WPF layered on top for traditional desktop apps.

However that is not exactly news - they've been dreaming of this for almost a decade now. What is changing is their position in the market and what their competitors are up to. Virtually everyone else is standardizing on OpenGL (including WebGL for browsers).

So the real question then becomes whether developers will bother target Microsoft platforms or not. Obviously game developers going for the PC and console markets has no choice, but game developers for mobiles might simply choose not to bother. In the same way if WebGL based websites begin to take off it could become more Microsoft's problem that Internet Explorer isn't supported than the other way around.

Edited 2013-01-22 07:40 UTC

XBox does do D3D, but low level API(the one that is used by most, now) is not D3D. PS3 and Wii titles also don't end up using OpenGL ES. Thing is, the low level API is very OpenGL'ish.

Also, don't overestimate D3D. There are not critical differences.

PS: DX is more than D3D.



It's exactly the point here. Mobile space is the future and OpenGL ES is the king there. Hell, Unity Tech has yet to release their engine for WP8.(Even though they support DX11 in Unity4)

I can't underestimate how much good for graphics API standards DX has done, but open standards are taking over.

Just asking. Is it viable to use DX on a console?
XBox titles seem to be on par with PS3 ones, while PS3 devs user bare metal programming.
Having heard that GFX APIs eat as much as 60% of the underlying HW performance something just doesn't add up here.

XBox 360 GPU is way better than the PS3 one. The PS3 can make for it because of the clever tricks the system allows (when going down to the metal) and because of the extra CPU muscle.

Direct X implementation in the XBox360 is quite close to the metal as well. As it has some "extras". It is also easier to optimize code written for a specific implementation of a given API.

BTW, it is a well known fact that in Windows-land drivers get adapted to the "important" games, even going to the point to detect the game that is being run and use for it a driver tuned for that game (maybe even hardcoding "optimizations" that work in that game but couldn't go to a generic driver as they deviate from the API behavior).

To a great degree your argument here hinges on whether or not a Windows Market actually takes off. I would wait and see on that. At this point I think we should start using "this is the year of MS on mobile" instead of "this is the year of linux on the desktop".

If its true that most computers are used for email, web browsing, youtube, etc a windows market won't really have much of an impact.

And another important item: Mobile is currently high growth, extremely high growth. PC is fairly stagnant. Follow the opportunity where there's real growth and real marketshare, it's currently on android and ios.

Why don't you just set up the gmail account with the normal gmail account type? You get everything except calendar syncing when you set it up. Accounts/Add account/Google. No need to use exchange for mail and contact syncing (and the Google account type also support push mail).

I thought MeeGo Harmattan supported CalDAV out of the box! Am I understanding anything wrong? Take a look at

http://techy.horwits.com/2012/03/nokia-n9-and-caldav-on-google.html

Unfortunately I don't own the device, so I can't try it before speaking.

Yes. CalDAV is for calendar data, CardDAV is for contacts.