Embrace, Extend and Extinguish

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" Embrace, extend and extinguish " ( EEE , "assume, extend and extinguish"), also called " Embrace, extend, and exterminate called," is a term that the US Justice Department of According to Microsoft internally as a corporate strategy is used, establish in product sectors starting from widely used standards by extending those standards with proprietary technologies and then using those extensions to penalize their competition. It is derived from embrace and extend , which occurs in a "motivational song" by Microsoft employee Dean Ballard , which deals with the reorganization of the company for the purpose of competitiveness against Internet software companies, especially Netscape .

The more common variation embrace, extend and extinguish was first publicly mentioned in the competition law -Gerichtsverhandlung (antitrust) United States against Microsoft . The vice president of Intel , Steven McGeady , testified that the vice president of Microsoft, Paul Maritz , used this phrase in a 1995 meeting with Intel to Microsoft's strategy with regard to Netscape, Java and the Internet to describe. In this context, the formulation is intended to highlight the last phase of the strategy, in which customers are deterred from using competing products.

The strategy

The strategy usually consists of the following three steps:

  1. Embrace (assume): Microsoft develops software that is largely compatible with competing products or with established open standards .
  2. Extend : Microsoft adds additional features and advertises them massively, but does not document the implementation in its own products, which means that these cannot be supported by competing products, whichresults in interoperability problems for users of competing products.
  3. Extinguish : Microsoft's extensions become de facto standard (due to their market dominance), which displaces the competition that does not want or cannot support the extensions and creates barriers for future competitors.

The US Department of Justice, Microsoft critics and IT journalists claim that the goal of this strategy is to get a monopoly on the relevant market sector. Microsoft states that this strategy is not against the laws of free competition and that it is at the company's discretion to implement features that the company believes customers want.

Examples

In view of the web browser , the plaintiffs alleged that Microsoft's support for ActiveX in Internet Explorer added to the compatibility with the Netscape Navigator to destroy that Java -based components and Netscape's own browser plug-in used system. The plaintiffs also accused Microsoft of using the “Embrace-And-Extend-Strategy” against Java by omitting the Java Native Interface in their implementation and offering J / Direct for similar purposes. According to internal communications, Microsoft wanted to downplay Java's platform independence and market it as "the newest, greatest way to write Windows programs." Microsoft paid Sun Microsystems US $ 20 million in January 2001 to avoid the legal consequences of the breach of contract.

There have been previous instances where Microsoft used unilateral compatibility with leading competition to market its products. For example, Microsoft Office was able to import WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 documents for a long time , but when saving Office documents in these formats, certain Office-specific features were not used.

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ US Department of Justice Proposed Findings of Fact
  2. ↑ Business Week, Kathy Rebello: Inside Microsoft (Part 1)
  3. ^ The Battle Hymn of the Reorg
  4. ↑ Steven McGeady court testimony ( doc format; 98 kB)
  5. ↑ United States v. Microsoft: Trial Summaries (page 2)
  6. ↑ From Beginner to Master Programmer: A Reading Course . February 15, 2009, archived from the original on February 15, 2009 ; accessed on June 18, 2019 (English, original website no longer available).
  7. ↑ Deadly embrace
  8. ↑ Microsoft messaging tactics recall browser wars
  9. ↑ Embrace, Extend, Extinguish: Three Strikes And You're Out  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.ddj.com  
  10. ↑ US v. Microsoft: We're Defending Our Right to Innovate . 1998, archived from the original on November 17, 2007 ; accessed on June 18, 2019 (English, original website no longer available).
  11. ↑ Matt Richtel: Memos Released in Sun-Microsoft Suit . In: The New York Times , October 22, 1998. Retrieved February 22, 2008. “The court documents state that in April 1997, Ben Slivka, the Microsoft manager responsible for executing the Java strategy, sent an E-mail to Microsoft's chairman , William H. Gates, noting "When I met with you last, you had a lot of pretty pointed questions about Java, so I want to make sure I understand your issues and concerns." Mr. Slivka goes on to ask if Mr. Gates's concerns included "How do we wrest control of Java away from Sun?" and "How we turn Java into just the latest, best way to write Windows applications?" 
  12. ^ Sun, Microsoft settle Java suit