Embrace, extend and extinguish

“ in Embrace, extend and extinguish ”, meaning “Embraces, extends, extinguishes” or “ in Embrace, extend, and exterminate ” “Embraces, extends, exterminates”, or, more simply, “ in Embrace and extend ”, is a slogan supposedly used by Microsoft in-house to describe its Stratégie introduction of products, implying standards largely used, extending these standards owners, using these differences with the detriment of its competitors. “ in Embrace and extend ” appeared in a song by Dean Ballard, employee of Microsoft, song which treats reorganization of the company because of competition with the other companies of Logiciel S Internet, in particular Netscape. ^,

The most current alternative, “ in embrace, extend and extinguish ”, was the first revealed time when the director of Intel, Steven McGeady, pled that the vice-president of Microsoft Paul Maritz used this sentence in a meeting of 1995 with Intel to describe the strategy of Microsoft vis-a-vis Netscape, the platform Java, and Internet ^,. In this context, the sentence underlined the final stage of the strategy of Microsoft, to move away the customers from the smaller competitors.

Strategy

In the majority of the circumstances this strategy is a triple process, at the following stages:

in Embrace : Microsoft develops software substantially compatible with the competing products, or implementing a public standard;
in Extend : Microsoft adds and makes the promotion of functions not supported by the competing products, creating problems of interworking for the neutral customers wishing to remain “ ”;
in Extinguish : The Microsoft extensions become a standard de facto because of their dominant position on the market, which marginalizes the competitors and creates a major hurdle with possible new competitors.

The American department of Justice ^,^,, the journalists in the fields of software industry, assert that the goal of this strategy is well to reach a situation of Monopole. Microsoft defends that this strategy is not a violation of competition but a will to guess what the customers wish.

Examples

the navigators Internet and the committee Antitrust consider that Microsoft implemented the ActiveX support in Internet Explorer to break compatibility with Netscape, which uses components based on the Java computer programming language like its own system of plugin. The plaintiffs also show Microsoft to employ the same strategy towards the Java platform, not implementing it and preferring J/Direct with a comparable goal to him.

the navigator IE6 does not respect the standards of the Web, W3C.

the mail server of Hotmail respects a format of email, neither “Post Office Protocol” (pop), nor “Internet Message Access Protocol” (IMAP).

Microsoft Office a long time made it possible to the users to import WordPerfect files like Lotus 1-2-3, but to safeguard an Office document in these formats causes compatibility issues.

the Library C " more sûre" provided with Visual Studio 2005 replaces unnecessarily certain standard functions (in particular fopen (), depreciated with the profit of fopen_s () without reason connects), which can be related to a strategy " embrace, extend, extinguish".

See too

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