Embrace, extend and extinguish

Encyclopedia : E : EM : EMB : Embrace, extend and extinguish

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"Embrace, extend and extinguish", also known as "Embrace, extend, and exterminate", is a phrase that the US Department of Justice alleged[US Department of Justice Proposed Findings of Fact] Microsoft used internally to describe their strategy for entering product categories involving widely-used standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and then using those differences to disadvantage its competitors. It is derived from the phrase "embrace and extend," which appeared in a motivational song by Microsoft employee Dean Ballard about the company's reorganization to meet competition from Internet software companies, particularly Netscape.

The more widely-used variation, "embrace, extend and extinguish", was first introduced in the United States v. Microsoft antitrust trial when the vice president of Intel, Steven McGeady, testified (DOC format) that Microsoft vice president Paul Maritz used the phrase in a 1995 meeting with Intel to describe Microsoft's strategy toward Netscape, Java, and the Internet. In this context the phrase means to highlight the final phase of Microsoft's strategy as raised by McGeady, which was to drive customers away from smaller competitors.

The strategy

In most contexts the strategy is a three part process consisting of the following steps:

1. Embrace: Microsoft develops software substantially compatible with a competing product, or implementing a public standard.
2. Extend: Microsoft adds and promotes features not supported by the competing product or part of the standard, creating interoperability problems for customers who try to remain neutral.
3. Extinguish: Microsoft's extensions become a de facto standard because of their dominant market share, marginalizing competitors that do not or cannot support Microsoft's extensions and creating an obstacle to new would-be competitors.

The U.S. Department of Justice, Microsoft critics, and computer-industry journalists claim that the goal of the strategy is to monopolize a product category. Microsoft asserts that the strategy is not anti-competitive, but rather an exercise of its discretion to implement features it believes customers want.

Examples

With regard to web browsers, the plaintiffs in the antitrust case claimed that Microsoft had added support for ActiveX controls in Internet Explorer to break compatibility with Netscape Navigator, which used components based on Java and Netscape's own plugin system. The plaintiffs also accused Microsoft of using an "embrace and extend" strategy with regard to the Java platform, by omitting the Java Native Interface from its implementation and providing J/Direct for a similar purpose. According to an internal communication, Microsoft sought to downplay Java's cross-platform capability and make it the "latest, greatest way to write Windows applications."

There are earlier cases of Microsoft using one-way compatibility with leading competitors to market its products. For example, Microsoft Office has long allowed users to import WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 files, but saving an Office document to those formats may omit some Office-specific features of the documents.

See also

• Criticism of Microsoft
• FUD
• Network effect
• Vendor lock-in
• Path dependency

Footnotes

External links

• [Report on Steven McGeady's testimony]

 

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