I recall that Microsoft became very cautious about executing embrace and extend tactics to decrease their profile for potential anti-trust cases. My guess afte

I recall that Microsoft became very cautious about executing embrace and extend tactics to decrease their profile for potential anti-trust cases. My guess after working at organisations under enhanced regulatory scrutiny, the distraction was probably felt most seriously in the upper cadres of the company as they would have had to critically evaluate acquisitions, new products as well as coordinate the legal and PR. The decrease in ravenous embrace and extend activities left large numbers of smaller businesses with viable business models, and ensured that the Internet remained fairly neutral for non-Microsoft software (although I still struggle to this day with intranets coded with VBScript for basic things like timewriting: if this had happened on the free Internet, it would have been significantly harder for the Firefox and Web 2.0 people to get any kind of traction...)