#EMBRACE EXTEND EXTINGUISH SERIES#

In the first edition of The Road Ahead, Bill Gates explains in detail his plans to use the network effect to Microsoft's advantage. 'Embrace, extend, and extinguish' is a strategy based on the network effect, the idea that the value of a product to a potential customer increases as the number of customers who already own that product increases.

This particular case is somewhat different as C# was developed as a Microsoft initiative. Some observers suspect that Microsoft intends to use eee with the C# programming language, by first getting many users for the ECMA-standard version of the language, then later adding proprietary extensions and removing support for the standards-based version.

NET as a Java-influenced alternative to Java. NET is marketed under the Microsoft brand name. Therefore, in the subject Java vs.NET, eee would not strictly apply, either, because. The phrase 'embrace, extend and extinguish' should be reserved for the particular strategy outlined above it would be inaccurate to apply the term to a subject such as Internet Explorer vs. The last example is of particular interest as it was the subject of a widely-publicized lawsuit between Microsoft and Sun Microsystems. To some, particularly Raymond, these documents constitute incontrovertible proof of Microsoft's unfair business practices.Įxamples of areas where 'embrace, extend and extinguish' has come into play: What exactly can be inferred from the documents about Microsoft's strategies is up to debate. Raymond and subsequently made available to the public.

#EMBRACE EXTEND EXTINGUISH SERIES#

That said, there is an increasing body of evidence to support this viewpoint, most notably the Halloween documents, a series of confidential, internal Microsoft memos which were leaked to prominent hacker Eric S. The phrase itself is not used by Microsoft, nor is such a strategy outlined in official Microsoft announcements thus, for fairness, it is important to note that the concept of 'embrace, extend and extinguish' is based on a particular viewpoint of Microsoft's strategy and that viewpoint's underlying assumptions about and opinions of Microsoft's business practices. The Microsoft standard then becomes the only standard that matters in practical terms, because it allows the company to control the industry by controlling the standard. Unfortunately, the Microsoft version uses proprietary technologies such as ActiveX that places competitors at a distinct disadvantage.

Extinguish: Through various means, such as driving use of their extended standard through their server products and developer tools, they increase use of the proprietary extensions to the point that competitors who do not follow the Microsoft version of the standard cannot compete.

They argue that they are trying only to add value for their customers, who want them to provide these features.

Extend: They do support the standard, at least partially, but start adding Microsoft-only extensions of the standard to their products.

They assign employees to work with the standards bodies, such as the W3C and the IETF.

Embrace: Microsoft publicly announces that they are going to support a standard.

The three stages of the eee strategy appear to be unfolding as follows: Some use eee to describe Microsoft's perceived strategy toward the Internet and other standards, in particular by those who see such a strategy as unfair competition. Microsoft, the Internet, and other standards 1 Microsoft, the Internet, and other standards

Embrace extend extinguish