"Embrace, extend, and extinguish" (EEE),[1] also known as "embrace, extend, and exterminate",[2] is a phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice found[3] to have been used internally by Microsoft[4] to describe its strategy for entering product categories involving widely used open standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and using the differences to strongly disadvantage its competitors.
Origin
The strategy and phrase "embrace and extend" were first described outside Microsoft in a 1996 article in The New York Times titled "Tomorrow, the World Wide Web! Microsoft, the PC King, Wants to Reign Over the Internet",[5] in which writer John Markoff said, "Rather than merely embrace and extend the Internet, the company's critics now fear, Microsoft intends to engulf it." The phrase "embrace and extend" also appears in a facetious motivational song by an anonymous Microsoft employee,[6] and in an interview of Steve Ballmer by The New York Times.[7]
A variant of the phrase, "embrace, extend then innovate", is used in J Allard's 1994 memo "Windows: The Next Killer Application on the Internet"[8] to Paul Maritz and other executives at Microsoft. The memo starts with a background on the Internet in general, and then proposes a strategy on how to turn Windows into the next "killer app" for the Internet:
Strategy
The strategy's three phases are:[12][13]
Microsoft claims the original strategy is not anti-competitive, but rather an exercise to implement features it believes customers want.[14]
- 1) Embrace: Development of software substantially compatible with an Open Standard.
- 2) Extend: Addition of features not supported by the Open Standard, creating interoperability problems.
- 3) Extinguish: When extensions become a de facto standard because of their dominant market share, they marginalize competitors who are unable to support the new extensions.
Examples by Microsoft
Browser incompatibilities
The plaintiffs in an antitrust case claimed Microsoft had added support for ActiveX controls in the Internet Explorer Web browser to break compatibility with Netscape Navigator, which used components based on Java and Netscape's own plugin system.
On CSS, data:, etc.: A decade after the original Netscape-related antitrust suit, the Web browser company Opera Software filed an antitrust complaint against Microsoft with the European Union, saying it "calls on Microsoft to adhere to its own public pronouncements to support these standards, instead of stifling them with its notorious 'Embrace, Extend and Extinguish' strategy".[15]
Office documents
In a memo to the Office product group in 1998, Bill Gates stated: "One thing we have got to change in our strategy – allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other people's browsers is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company. We have to stop putting any effort into this and make sure that Office documents very well depend on proprietary IE capabilities. Anything else is suicide for our platform. This is a case where Office has to avoid doing something to destroy Windows."
Web browsers
Netscape
During the browser wars, Netscape implemented the "font" tag, among other HTML extensions, without seeking review from a standards body. With the rise of Internet Explorer, the two companies became locked in a dead heat to out-implement each other with non-standards-compliant features. In 2004, to prevent a repeat of the "browser wars", and the resulting morass of conflicting standards, the browser vendors Apple Inc. (Safari), Mozilla Foundation (Firefox), and Opera Software (Opera browser) formed the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) to create open standards to complement those of the World Wide Web Consortium.[24] Microsoft refused to join, citing the group's lack of a patent policy as the reason.[25]
Google Chrome
See also
- 32-bit vs 64-bit
- AARD code
- Criticism of Microsoft
- Halloween documents
- Microsoft and open source
- Network effect
- Path dependence
- Vendor lock-in
- Enshittification
- Planned obsolescence
External links
References
- Deadly embrace The Economist, 2000-03-30^
- QUOTE 1:"'We've never believed that Microsoft would truly make their XML format interoperable,' said Gregg Nicholas, a technology manager from Berrien County, Mich. Microsoft's 'standard operating procedure with standards seems to be embrace, extend and exterminate. Despite the hype from their public relations department, I've seen no reason to believe that they would act any differently with XML.' For this and other reasons such as low-cost 'viable alternatives' to Office, 'it is uncertain that we'll be upgrading,' Nichols (sic) said."QUOTE 2: ("Note", that:) this quote actually specifies -- near the end -- a specific example of one of those low-cost "viable alternatives" to [Microsoft] Office mentioned in "QUOTE 1":"Other companies are interested in the easy exchange of XML data on the desktop. In November, members of the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) established a committee to create that standard for office productivity applications. Supporters, which include Corel and Sun, are using the XML specifications developed by the open-source OpenOffice.org project as a starting point. Microsoft is not a participant."