Embrace, extend and extinguish

"Embrace, extend, and extinguish", also known as "Embrace, extend, and exterminate", is a phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice found that was used internally by Microsoft to describe its strategy for entering product categories involving widely used standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and then using those differences to disadvantage its competitors.

The strategy and phrase "embrace and extend" were first described outside Microsoft in a 1996 New York Times article titled "Tomorrow, the World Wide Web! Microsoft, the PC King, Wants to Reign Over the Internet", in which writer John Markoff said, "Rather than merely embrace and extend the Internet, the company's critics now fear, Microsoft intends to engulf it." The phrase "embrace and extend" also appears in a facetious motivational song by Microsoft employee Dean Ballard, and in an interview of Steve Ballmer by the New York Times.

The variation, "embrace, extend and extinguish", was first introduced in the United States v. Microsoft antitrust trial when a vice president of Intel, Steven McGeady, testified that Microsoft vice president Paul Maritz used the phrase in a 1995 meeting with Intel to describe Microsoft's strategy toward Netscape, Java, and the Internet.

The strategy's three phases are:

Microsoft claims that the original strategy is not anti-competitive, but rather an exercise of its discretion to implement features it believes customers want.

An older variant of the phrase is "embrace, extend then innovate" in J Allard's 1994 memo "Windows: The Next Killer Application on the Internet" to Paul Maritz and other executives at Microsoft. The memo starts with a background on the Internet in general, and then proposes a strategy on how to turn Windows into the next "killer app" for the Internet:

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