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 seemingly broken technology, while Microsoft controls the non-standard extensions.

Although the behavior is today reproached to Microsoft because of their dominant position in the computing world, it has been present all along in both computer and non-computer history. It is natural for an engineer to try to improve existing technology and it is natural for groups of people to try to create their own vision of the world. Most companies see standards as merely a way of comforting customers that a technology is fundamentally mature and immediately concentrate on proprietary extensions, the value added, which is the primary way of retaining customers over time.

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 place 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:

• HTML
• JavaScript
• Kerberos
• Microsoft BASIC
• SMB networking
• Active Directory vs. LDAP
• Indirect control of the IBM compatible PC architecture
• Media Transfer Protocol
• C++
• JavaScript/JScript
• Java

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. 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.

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.NET 2005, will gain wide acceptance.

"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 balkanizing 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 General Public License prevents 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.

Free software EEE

One can notice this approach is also shared by the free software tools. Comparison between GNU/Linux and previous UNIX operating systems shows that GNU/Linux has embraced, extended and extinguished most of them as of today, most prominently SCO UNIX, which used to be the market leader of UNIX on IBM PC compatible computers. Remaining ones like Solaris are struggling and subsist merely because vendors primarily draw revenue from computer hardware.

Since free software is not public domain, and is actually governed by a tough and politically-motivated license and agenda, UNIX vendors cannot incorporate extensions without being subject to strong constraints, which oblige them to seriously reconsider their business models. Just as Microsoft intends to get a 100% share in every market they actively invest (the fair share is 100% according to Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer), free software intends to eliminate all other forms of software in markets of perceived wide interest.

Free software developers have implemented numerous nonstandard (and subject to the GPL and other licenses) extensions in the compilers, in the libraries, in the utilities and on-disk formats and it is difficult to adopt only part of the solution. The Linux kernel requires C compiler extensions only present in the GNU C compiler, just like Windows code requires extensions originally only present in the Microsoft C compiler.

See also

• Raising the complexity bar -- another way of killing off open standards
• Monopoly leverage

External link

• 1998 accusation of Microsoft's desire to apply 'extend, embrace and extinguish' competition to Intel