Embrace, Extend and Extinguish

" Embrace, extend and extinguish " (EEE, "assume, extend and extinguish " ), also called " Embrace, extend, and exterminate " called, is a term that is according to the U.S. Department of Justice used by Microsoft internally as a corporate strategy to to establish the basis of widely used standards in product sectors by expanding these standards with proprietary technologies and then use those extensions to discriminating against their competitors it. It is derived from embrace and extend, which occurs in a "motivational song" from Microsoft employees Dean Ballard, that deals with the reorganization of the company for the purpose of ability to compete with Internet software companies, especially Netscape.

The more common variation embrace, extend and extinguish was first publicly mentioned in the competition law - court proceedings ( antitrust ) United States v. Microsoft. The Vice-President of Intel, Steven McGeady, testified that the vice president of Microsoft, Paul Maritz, this formulation used in 1995 in a meeting with Intel to describe Microsoft's strategy regarding Netscape, Java and the Internet. In this context, the formulation is to highlight the last phase of the strategy, in which customers are put off by the use of competing products.

The strategy

The strategy is generally of the following three steps:

The U.S. Department of Justice, Microsoft critics and IT journalists claim that the goal of this strategy was to obtain a monopoly in the relevant market sector. Microsoft explains that this strategy is not contrary to the laws of free competition and it was within the discretion of the company to implement features, of which the company believes that customer they wanted.

Examples

In view of the web browser plaintiff alleged that Microsoft added support for ActiveX in Internet Explorer in order to destroy the compatibility with Netscape Navigator, which Java-based components and Netscape took its own plugin system. The plaintiffs accused Microsoft also apply the " Embrace -and- Extend " strategy against Java, by omitting the Java Native Interface in their implementation and J / Direct offered for similar purposes. Internal communications, according to Microsoft Java wanted to downplay platform independence and using it as the " latest, greatest way to write Windows programs " Microsoft paid in January 2001, 20 million U.S. dollars of Sun Microsystems, to avoid legal consequences of the breach of contract.

There are previous cases in which Microsoft used unilateral compatibility with leading competition to market its products. For example, Microsoft Office was a long time to import WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2 -3 documents, but when saving Office documents in these formats some Office own features were not used.