Redirected from Embrace, extend, and extinguish
Embrace, extend and extinguish is a phrase used to describe Microsoft Corporation's strategy toward Internet and other standards and was outlined in a series of memos known as the Halloween documents. It is a system based on the network effect. The strategy works like this:
Examples of attempts of "embrace, extend and extinguish":
Some observers suspect that Microsoft intends to do a similar thing to 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.
In the first edition of The Road Ahead[?] by Bill Gates, he explains in detail his plans to use the network effect to Microsoft's advantage. The book was first published before the company became involved in antitrust proceedings.
The "embrace, extend, and extinguish" strategy seems to have had limited usefulness. It has only been partially successful in balkanising HTML, mostly through the alternations to the Document Object Model in Internet Explorer. One flaw in this strategy is that incompatible enhancements generally create customer pushback especially when those enhancements have limited usefulness. ActiveX is an example of a Microsoft technology that has met with customer resistance.
So far, standards embodied in popular free software implementations have appeared to be resistant to the "Embrace, extend and extinguish" strategy, as the provisions of free software licences prevent the third phase of the plan from being executed, by ensuring that any vendor extensions to the software are available to the community, and cannot be tied to any single vendor. One could create a proprietary "clean-room" reimplementation -- a technique often used to create free software workalikes of proprietary programs -- but would have an uphill battle in a marketplace already flooded with the free implementation.
Search Encyclopedia
|
Featured Article
|