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Microsoft, like many other companies in their heyday, has publicly stated that it aims to "embrace and extend" popular standards and existing work. "Embrace, extend and extinguish" (EEE) is a scornful takeoff on this by Microsoft's critics, used to suggest that the stages of embracing and extending are only prefaces to extinguishing or supplanting existing work with Microsoft alternatives. The term is commonly used on websites such as Slashdot where anti-Microsoft thinking abounds. Critics of Microsoft say the company uses EEE to drive competitors out of business by forcing them to use nonstandard and often purportedly problematic technology that Microsoft controls. Microsoft Corporation NASDAQ: MSFT is the worlds largest software company, with global annual sales in the tens of billions of US dollars and nearly 60,000 employees in more than 90 countries. ...
Standardization, in the context related to technologies and industries, is the process of establishing a technical standard among competing entities in a market, where this will bring benefits without hurting competition. ...
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The front page of the English Wikipedia Website. ...
Slashdot (often abbreviated to /.) is a popular technology-related website, updated many times daily with articles that are short summaries of stories on other websites with links to the stories, and provisions for readers to comment on each story. ...
Although the behavior is today attributed to Microsoft because of their dominant position in the computing world, it has been present all along in both computer and non-computer history. Originally, the word computing was synonymous with counting and calculating, and a science that deals with the original sense of computing mathematical calculations. ...
(A similar takeoff with slightly more detail on the process is "Copy, corrupt, copyright, circulate, control".)
Microsoft, the Internet, and other standards Microsoft's strategy toward the Internet and other standards has been described as being EEE by those who claim that the company exercises unfair anticompetitive practices. Open Standards are publicly available specifications for achieving a specific task. ...
The three stages of the EEE strategy consists of the following steps:
- Embrace: The company publicly announces that they are going to support a standard. They assign an employee or employees to work with the standards bodies, such as the W3C and the IETF.
- Extend: They do support the standard, at least partially, but start adding company-only extensions of the standard to their products. They argue that they are trying only to add value for their customers, who want them to provide these features.
- 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 company version of the standard cannot compete. The company standard then becomes the only standard that matters in practical terms (a de facto standard), and it allows the company to control the industry by controlling the standard.
Evidence held up in support of the 'EEE' view of Microsoft's policies include the Halloween documents, a series of confidential, internal Microsoft memos related to dealing with Linux and open source software, which were leaked to the public. What exactly can be inferred from the documents about Microsoft's strategies is up to debate. Employment is a contract between two parties, one being the employer and the other being the employee. ...
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international consortium where member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public, work together to develop standards for the World Wide Web. ...
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is charged with developing and promoting Internet standards, in particular, those of the TCP/IP protocol suite. ...
The Halloween documents is the name used outside Microsoft for a series of confidential memoranda on potential strategies related to Open source software and to Linux in particular. ...
Tux is the official Linux mascot. ...
Open source refers to projects that are open to the public and which draw on other projects that are freely available to the general public. ...
Examples of areas where "embrace, extend and extinguish" have been alleged:
The last example was the subject of a widely-publicized lawsuit between Microsoft and Sun Microsystems, which was settled. A Softmodem is a software modem designed to use a host computers resources (mostly CPU power and RAM but sometimes even any eventually present Audio hardware) instead of dedicated hardware of its own, unlike traditional modems. ...
In computing, HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is a markup language designed for the creation of web pages and other information viewable in a browser. ...
In computing, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a stylesheet language used to describe the presentation of a document written in a markup language. ...
Document Object Model (DOM) is a description of how a HTML or XML document is represented in an object-oriented fashion. ...
Kerberos is a computer network authentication protocol which allows individuals communicating over an insecure network to prove their identity to one another in a secure manner. ...
Altair BASIC, in its first incarnation, MITS 4K BASIC, was a true milestone in software history — the first programming language for the worlds first truly personal computer, the MITS Altair 8800. ...
This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ...
One of the first PCs from IBM - the IBM PC model 5150. ...
The Media Transfer Protocol is a set of extensions to the Picture Transfer Protocol (PTP) and FotoNations PTP/IP (extensions for wireless PTP) devised by Microsoft, to allow the protocol to be used for devices other than digital cameras, for example digital audio players and MP3 players. ...
C++ (pronounced see plus plus, IPA: ) is a general-purpose computer programming language. ...
OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) is a specification defining a cross-language cross-platform API for writing applications that produce 3D computer graphics (and 2D computer graphics as well). ...
JavaScript is an object-based scripting programming language based on the concept of prototypes. ...
Java is an object-oriented programming language developed by James Gosling and colleagues at Sun Microsystems in the early 1990s. ...
Sun Microsystems, Inc. ...
The phrase "embrace, extend and extinguish" should be reserved for the particular strategy outlined above. Therefore, in the subject Java vs. .NET, EEE would not strictly apply either because .NET is marketed under the Microsoft brand name. However, a J# language is positioned in .NET as a way to lure Java programmers to the .NET Framework. 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, which was intentionally designed as a successor to the popular C programming language, then later adding proprietary extensions and removing support for the standards-based version. However, at the present time Microsoft has not deviated therefore those suspicions may be unfounded. Java is an object-oriented programming language developed by James Gosling and colleagues at Sun Microsystems in the early 1990s. ...
The . ...
The J# (pronounced J-sharp) programming language is a transitional language for programmers of Suns Java and Microsofts J++ languages, so they may use their existing knowledge, and applications on Microsofts . ...
The title given to this article is incorrect due to technical limitations. ...
Ecma International - European association for standardising information and communication systems came into existence in 1994, when the European Computer Manufacturers Association (ECMA) changed its name in order to reflect the international activities of the organisation (the long form of ECMA was dropped then, and capitalization changed to reflect this). ...
Another example is the C++ programming language. First, Microsoft tried to extend it as Managed C++ in Visual C++.NET; however, this attempt was met with a lot of resistance as the managed extensions were poorly implemented and aesthetically unappealing. Because of the poor reception, Microsoft made a second attempt at extending C++, this time calling it C++/CLI. It remains to be seen whether these new extensions, which are scheduled to appear in Visual Studio 2005, will gain wide acceptance. The other issue with Microsoft's C++ implementation appears to be the removal of many originally strict errors and warnings that appear in other, more standards compliant compilers such as the open-source GCC compiler. The omission of these errors frequently causes strange portability problems and compiler failures when porting C++ code, even if it does not contain any Microsoft-specific code. C++ (pronounced see plus plus, IPA: ) is a general-purpose computer programming language. ...
Managed C++ is one of Microsofts new managed languages for their . ...
Overview C++/CLI is the newer language specification due to supersede Managed Extensions for C++. Completely reviewed to simplify the older Managed C++ syntax, it provides much more clarity over code readability than Managed C++. It is currently only available on Visual Studio 2005 Beta editions. ...
Visual Studio 2005 is the latest development suite from Microsoft. ...
The purported effectiveness of EEE lies in network effect, the idea that the value of a product to a potential customer increases as the number of customers who already use that product increases. In the first edition of The Road Ahead, Bill Gates explains in detail his plans to use the network effect to Microsoft's advantage. The network effect causes a good or service to have a value to a potential customer dependent on the number of customers already owning that good or using that service. ...
The Road Ahead is an autobiography written by Bill Gates with Nathan Myrvold and Peter Rinearson in 1995, published in 1996. ...
William Henry Bill Gates III (born October 28, 1955) is the co-founder, chairman, and chief software architect of Microsoft Corporation, the worlds largest computer software company. ...
Self-limitation of EEE If true, Microsoft's "embrace, extend, and extinguish" strategy seems to have had limited usefulness. It has affected HTML, mostly through the alterations 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. Microsoft Internet Explorer, abbreviated IE or MSIE, is a proprietary graphical web browser made by Microsoft and currently available as part of Microsoft Windows. ...
See also Open systems are computer systems that provide either interoperability, portability, or freedom from proprietary standards, depending on your perspective. ...
Open Standards are publicly available specifications for achieving a specific task. ...
An open format is a published specification for storing digital data, usually maintained by a non-proprietary standards organization, and free of legal restrictions on use. ...
The OpenDocument format (ODF), short for the OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications, is an open document file format for saving and exchanging editable office documents such as text documents (including memos, reports, and books), spreadsheets, charts, and presentations. ...
The network effect causes a good or service to have a value to a potential customer dependent on the number of customers already owning that good or using that service. ...
In economics, vendor lock-in, also known as proprietary lock-in, lock-in, or the Pottersville pattern, is a situation in which a customer is dependent on a vendor for products and services and cannot move to another vendor without substantial switching costs, real and/or perceived. ...
A process is said to be path-dependent if accidental events might have a persistent effect on its course. ...
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