3 ms·
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
by 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.