I saw Embrace, Extend, Extinguish play out first hand with the standardization of SPF. Things seem to be going well and seemingly right before consensus, Micro

I saw Embrace, Extend, Extinguish play out first hand with the standardization of SPF. Things seem to be going well and seemingly right before consensus, Microsoft shows up and says it won't work because clients, namely Outlook, don't support it, despite that it has nothing to do with MUAs. This distracts people enough so that Microsoft has enough time to come up with SenderID, which co-opts the data format of SPF allowing MS to say they are trying to be compatible when it really subverts the intent of the standard. They also claimed they may or may not have patent interests but won't say exactly what they are, that will have to wait until after everything is standardized and the patents are filed--because since this is such an innovative idea Microsoft is being kind enough to file patents so that the community and standard is protected in the event someone else is waiting with a submarine patent, even though the IETF discourages standards that are patent encumbered. Microsoft gets to say it is trying to work with the community, and through press releases and public policy statements confuses the goals and intent of SPF and SenderID. IETF decides to create two RFCs and gives them Experimental status, thereby almost ensuring that no one will adopt either fully, but to this day we still need to create multiple DNS records and are never sure exactly how email receiving systems will interpret them. (working from years-old memory, I don't mean to present the above as representative of the exact order of events, but I'm sure someone else could be found who could reasonably corroborate it)