5 ms·

"Embrace and extend" - Microsoft's long-standing strategy for overtaking & destroying the ahead-of-the-game competition. Provide high-quality tools cheap, seduc

"Embrace and extend" - Microsoft's long-standing strategy for overtaking & destroying the ahead-of-the-game competition. Provide high-quality tools cheap, seduce developers off the canonical platform and onto MS's highly compatible equivalents, then slowly fork the standard, leaving customers with the choice of abandoning their deeply-vested stake in MS toolsets etc or going all-in with MS. AFAIK we ended up with C# because MS created a very nice Java IDE, started to fork it, developers vested in that IDE got mad at Sun Microsystems (developers & owners of Java standard), Sun sued MS, MS was told to cut it out, MS mutated Java into C#. Let's hope this doesn't turn into MS trying to rip iOS developers/users away from Apple as done many times before.

recursive 11y ago
If they are ripped away to something better, then I don't share your hope.
vvanders 11y ago
I'd consider C# a much superior "fork" of Java. If that's the case here then I'm all for it.
pmelendez 11y ago
> MS mutated Java into C#. I'm not sure that's true. The Sun vs. MS litigation ocurred on 2001 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_J%2B%2B#Sun.27s_litigation_against_Microsoft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_J%2B%2B#Sun.27s_litigat...) On the other hand, C# first appeared in 2000
- ptx 11y ago
  The litigation was settled in 2001 (according to that page) but occurred before then. MS shipped their Java implementation since at least 1997, which included P/Invoke and COM interop – things that encouraged integration with native (platform-specific) win32 libraries and look pretty much the same in C#.
codeulike 11y ago
Thats not really how C# happened. edit: also I think embrance,extend,extinguish wont work anymore in the dev space because Microsoft no longer have the monopoly on dev desktops and probably never will again - far from it infact. Its more like they're trying to re-capture dev interest because very few decent websites are built/run on windows (other than StackExchange) and not much app development is happening on windows, etc etc.
jakejake 11y ago
Both Apple and MS have been doing that for a while. MS got me when they came out with MS Word, which opened formats from just about every other word processor - Wordperfect being the main one. Apple got me when they introduced Bootcamp and I was able to run both OSs on one machine. Slowly but surely it got to be a pain to keep booting back and forth and I switched to OSX. I'd imagine it's a similar story for a lot of us out there, just different apps, libraries, dev tools, etc, luring us back and forth between the various operating systems. I wonder if I could be lured back to the MS side?!
ghshephard 11y ago
As a former Netscapee, I'm probably first in line to call foul on Microsoft's Embrace-Extend-Extinguish strategy (See how much damage Active Directory did to Universal LDAP support - ever try and run Outlook/Windows domain on anything but a Microsoft Directory Server?) - but that's an old war. And it's over. The beginning started in 2007 with the release of the iPhone (some such as Benedict Evans might suggest the transition to Web Apps was the beginning, but IE tried to corner that market by injecting Active-X everywhere) and Android. Microsoft failed to release a high-quality mobile solution quickly enough, and the transition to mobile effectively ended the Microsoft Hegemony. The War was officially over with the departure of Balmer, and official declaration of defeat occurred when Nadella wrote off the vast majority of the Nokia acquisition. In order to compete, Microsoft now has to play on, and support, platforms which it does not, and never will, control. It's taking a while for me to adjust (16 years?), but I have to say - I really like this new Microsoft, and I'm looking forward to the great things that they are going to do now that they are no longer the Monopolistic behemoth that they were for so many years.
- pgeorgi 11y ago
  The war is over? As a former Netscapee you might remember the relevance of Microsoft in terms of Web Browsers before IE4. That's where Microsoft is now with their mobile OS, and it's nearly exactly the same playbook: developer mindshare and one-way compatibility to make their lousy offer become less lousy. Given that some XAML-in-UIKit stuff is discussed somewhere else here, they may already work on extending beyond iOS, probably hoping to keep Apple busy with eternal catch-up (since they're said to have cross licensing agreements, patent wars are likely out of the question here).
  - ghshephard 11y ago
    The key difference is, Microsoft was able to leverage their monopoly in one industry (Desktop) to destroy the competition in another (Browsers, though yes, that phoenix did rise from the ashes) The war is over because Microsoft no longer has a monopoly they can leverage to do this again. Microsoft is not, and will not be a force in the mobile phone world for the foreseeable future. Re: "probably hoping to keep Apple busy with eternal catch-up" You've got the causation going the wrong direction - Apple doesn't have to catch up to Microsoft any more, it's Microsoft that has to play catch up with Apple. I can't describe it any better than Benedict Evans did, so I'll just share his analysis: http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2015/7/8/capitulation http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2015/7/8/capitulation

recursive 11y ago

If they are ripped away to something better, then I don't share your hope.

vvanders 11y ago

I'd consider C# a much superior "fork" of Java. If that's the case here then I'm all for it.

pmelendez 11y ago

> MS mutated Java into C#. I'm not sure that's true. The Sun vs. MS litigation ocurred on 2001 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_J%2B%2B#Sun.27s_litigation_against_Microsoft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_J%2B%2B#Sun.27s_litigat...) On the other hand, C# first appeared in 2000

ptx 11y ago
The litigation was settled in 2001 (according to that page) but occurred before then. MS shipped their Java implementation since at least 1997, which included P/Invoke and COM interop – things that encouraged integration with native (platform-specific) win32 libraries and look pretty much the same in C#.

codeulike 11y ago

Thats not really how C# happened. edit: also I think embrance,extend,extinguish wont work anymore in the dev space because Microsoft no longer have the monopoly on dev desktops and probably never will again - far from it infact. Its more like they're trying to re-capture dev interest because very few decent websites are built/run on windows (other than StackExchange) and not much app development is happening on windows, etc etc.

jakejake 11y ago

Both Apple and MS have been doing that for a while. MS got me when they came out with MS Word, which opened formats from just about every other word processor - Wordperfect being the main one. Apple got me when they introduced Bootcamp and I was able to run both OSs on one machine. Slowly but surely it got to be a pain to keep booting back and forth and I switched to OSX. I'd imagine it's a similar story for a lot of us out there, just different apps, libraries, dev tools, etc, luring us back and forth between the various operating systems. I wonder if I could be lured back to the MS side?!

ghshephard 11y ago

As a former Netscapee, I'm probably first in line to call foul on Microsoft's Embrace-Extend-Extinguish strategy (See how much damage Active Directory did to Universal LDAP support - ever try and run Outlook/Windows domain on anything but a Microsoft Directory Server?) - but that's an old war. And it's over. The beginning started in 2007 with the release of the iPhone (some such as Benedict Evans might suggest the transition to Web Apps was the beginning, but IE tried to corner that market by injecting Active-X everywhere) and Android. Microsoft failed to release a high-quality mobile solution quickly enough, and the transition to mobile effectively ended the Microsoft Hegemony. The War was officially over with the departure of Balmer, and official declaration of defeat occurred when Nadella wrote off the vast majority of the Nokia acquisition. In order to compete, Microsoft now has to play on, and support, platforms which it does not, and never will, control. It's taking a while for me to adjust (16 years?), but I have to say - I really like this new Microsoft, and I'm looking forward to the great things that they are going to do now that they are no longer the Monopolistic behemoth that they were for so many years.

pgeorgi 11y ago
The war is over? As a former Netscapee you might remember the relevance of Microsoft in terms of Web Browsers before IE4. That's where Microsoft is now with their mobile OS, and it's nearly exactly the same playbook: developer mindshare and one-way compatibility to make their lousy offer become less lousy. Given that some XAML-in-UIKit stuff is discussed somewhere else here, they may already work on extending beyond iOS, probably hoping to keep Apple busy with eternal catch-up (since they're said to have cross licensing agreements, patent wars are likely out of the question here).
- ghshephard 11y ago
  The key difference is, Microsoft was able to leverage their monopoly in one industry (Desktop) to destroy the competition in another (Browsers, though yes, that phoenix did rise from the ashes) The war is over because Microsoft no longer has a monopoly they can leverage to do this again. Microsoft is not, and will not be a force in the mobile phone world for the foreseeable future. Re: "probably hoping to keep Apple busy with eternal catch-up" You've got the causation going the wrong direction - Apple doesn't have to catch up to Microsoft any more, it's Microsoft that has to play catch up with Apple. I can't describe it any better than Benedict Evans did, so I'll just share his analysis: http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2015/7/8/capitulation http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2015/7/8/capitulation