Embrace and extend

Microsoft 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, perhaps with less effective standards or work.

Critics of Microsoft say the company uses EEE to drive competitors out of business by forcing them to use inferior technology, while Microsoft controls the dominant technology.

Microsoft, the Internet, and other standards

Some use EEE to describe Microsoft's perceived strategy toward the Internet and other standards, in particular by those who see such a strategy as unfair competition.

The three stages of the EEE strategy appear to be unfolding as follows:

  1. Embrace: Microsoft publicly announces that they are going to support a standard. They assign employees to work with the standards bodies, such as the W3C and the IETF.
  2. Extend: They do support the standard, at least partially, but start adding Microsoft-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.
  3. 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 Microsoft version of the standard cannot compete. Unfortunately, the Microsoft version uses proprietary technologies such as ActiveX that places competitors at a distinct disadvantage. The Microsoft standard then becomes the only standard that matters in practical terms, because it allows the company to control the industry by controlling the standard.

Evidence held up in support of this 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. To some, particularly Eric S. Raymond, these documents constitute incontrovertible proof of Microsoft's unfair business practices.

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.

The phrase "embrace, extend and extinguish" should be reserved for the particular strategy outlined above; it would be inaccurate to apply the term to a subject such as Internet Explorer vs. Netscape Navigator. 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 Java-influenced alternative to Java.

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.

"Embrace, extend, and extinguish" is a strategy based on the 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.

Self-limitation of EEE

The "embrace, extend, and extinguish" strategy seems to have had limited usefulness. It has only been partially successful in balkanising 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. 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 Foundation's GNU Public 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.

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