Yet Another Blog

Embrace, extend and extinguish

“Embrace, extend and extinguish,” also known as “Embrace, extend, and exterminate,” is a phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice alleged was used internally by Microsoft 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.

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The strategy

The alleged strategy’s three phases are:

• Embrace: Development of software substantially compatible with a competing product, or implementing a public standard.
• Extend: Addition and promotion of features not supported by the competing product or part of the standard, creating interoperability problems for customers who try to use the ‘simple’ standard.
• Extinguish: When extensions become a de facto standard because of their dominant market share, they marginalize competitors that do not or cannot support the new extensions.

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Aqui está mais uma das razões pelas quais evito usar os produtos da MS…

Etiquetas: Liberdade, Microsoft, Tecnologia