4 ms·

my view is that embrace/extend has really always been a general platform business thing and not specifically a Microsoft thing. it became infamously associated

my view is that embrace/extend has really always been a general platform business thing and not specifically a Microsoft thing. it became infamously associated with Microsoft in '90s-00s because of the monopoly position they had. since Microsoft is still a platform business, it's reasonable to be wary of the negative potential of embrace/extend in connection with them, for the same reason it is in connection with Google and others.

derefr 6y ago
I don't see Microsoft doing much EEE on their modern non-cost-centre platform (Azure), though. Amazon is a much clearer example these days, with AWS having "embraced and extended" Postgres into Aurora, Redis into ElastiCache, and many other examples. (I don't know if AWS has ever gone all the way and "extinguished" any of the cores they've built upon, though?)
- forty 6y ago
  MemoryStore is GCP, AWS' redis is named Elasticache.
- contextfree 6y ago
  at its most benign embrace/extend can just mean that your product supports the standards people expect and need, and there's also some differentiating aspect in which it's better than the other options (otherwise why does it exist?) It can be a bit fuzzy defining precisely where that benign sense stops and the negative sense where the "differentiation" brings harmful lockin begins. Then if you have a monopoly position the "extinguish" bit can come in. But actually AFAICT Microsoft rarely (never?) actually succeeded in extinguishing any of the open standards they were infamous for attacking - their successes happened earlier against proprietary competitors like Lotus 1/2/3 and Novell Netware
  - derefr 6y ago
    > But actually AFAICT Microsoft rarely (never?) actually succeeded in extinguishing any of the open standards they were infamous for attacking SMB pretty well extinguished the use of NFS; and Active Directory pretty well extinguished the use of LDAP. Neither of these were really Microsoft-driven, though. It was almost the reverse: the ecosystem cloned Microsoft's approach into FOSS, and then liked it better, and replaced their own stuff with it without Microsoft's participation. Sort of like how BitKeeper's approach was cloned as git, which then extinguished most other SCMs.

derefr 6y ago

I don't see Microsoft doing much EEE on their modern non-cost-centre platform (Azure), though. Amazon is a much clearer example these days, with AWS having "embraced and extended" Postgres into Aurora, Redis into ElastiCache, and many other examples. (I don't know if AWS has ever gone all the way and "extinguished" any of the cores they've built upon, though?)

forty 6y ago
MemoryStore is GCP, AWS' redis is named Elasticache.
contextfree 6y ago
at its most benign embrace/extend can just mean that your product supports the standards people expect and need, and there's also some differentiating aspect in which it's better than the other options (otherwise why does it exist?) It can be a bit fuzzy defining precisely where that benign sense stops and the negative sense where the "differentiation" brings harmful lockin begins. Then if you have a monopoly position the "extinguish" bit can come in. But actually AFAICT Microsoft rarely (never?) actually succeeded in extinguishing any of the open standards they were infamous for attacking - their successes happened earlier against proprietary competitors like Lotus 1/2/3 and Novell Netware
- derefr 6y ago
  > But actually AFAICT Microsoft rarely (never?) actually succeeded in extinguishing any of the open standards they were infamous for attacking SMB pretty well extinguished the use of NFS; and Active Directory pretty well extinguished the use of LDAP. Neither of these were really Microsoft-driven, though. It was almost the reverse: the ecosystem cloned Microsoft's approach into FOSS, and then liked it better, and replaced their own stuff with it without Microsoft's participation. Sort of like how BitKeeper's approach was cloned as git, which then extinguished most other SCMs.