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EEEE redirects here. For the NYSE ticker symbol, see Sylvan Learning Center. "Embrace, extend and extinguish"•, also known as "Embrace, extend, and exterminate"•, is a phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice alleged Microsoft used internally 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. It is derived from the phrase "embrace and extend," which appeared in a motivational song by Microsoft employee Dean Ballard about the company's reorganization to meet competition from Internet software companies, particularly Netscape••. The more widely-used variation, "embrace, extend and extinguish", was first introduced in the United States v. Microsoft antitrust trial when the vice president of Intel, Steven McGeady, testified• that Microsoft vice president Paul Maritz used the phrase in a 1995 meeting with Intel to describe Microsoft's strategy toward Netscape, Java, and the Internet••. In this context the phrase means to highlight the final phase of Microsoft's strategy as raised by McGeady, which was to drive customers away from smaller competitors.
The strategy In most contexts the strategy is a three part process consisting of the following steps: The U.S. Department of Justice, Microsoft critics, and computer-industry journalists••• claim that the goal of the strategy is to monopolize a product category. Microsoft asserts that the strategy is not anti-competitive, but rather an exercise of its discretion to implement features it believes customers want. • Examples With regard to web browsers, the plaintiffs in the antitrust case claimed that Microsoft had added support for ActiveX controls in Internet Explorer to break compatibility with Netscape Navigator, which used components based on Java and Netscape's own plugin system. The plaintiffs also accused Microsoft of using an "embrace and extend" strategy with regard to the Java platform, by omitting the Java Native Interface from its implementation and providing J/Direct for a similar purpose. According to an internal communication, Microsoft sought to downplay Java's cross-platform capability and make it the "latest, greatest way to write Windows applications." Microsoft paid Sun $20 million U.S. in January of 2001 to settle the resulting legal implications of their breach of contract•. There are earlier cases of Microsoft using one-way compatibility with leading competitors to market its products. For example, Microsoft Office has long allowed users to import WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 files, but saving an Office document to those formats may omit some Office-specific features of the documents. Counter-criticism Several justifications for the 'Embrace and Extend' strategy have been offered by commentators, both for the underlying appropriateness of the general strategy, as well as for specific actions taken by Microsoft pursuant to it. These justifications often downplay or omit the "extinguish" element as irrelevant to the purpose of this strategy. For example, in the highly competitive sector of software development: See also Footnotes | ||||||||
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