The Strategy
The strategy's three phases are:
- Embrace: Development of software substantially compatible with a competing product, or implementing a public standard.
- Extend: Addition and promotion of features not supported by the competing product or part of the standard, creating interoperability problems for customers who try to use the 'simple' standard.
- Extinguish: When extensions become a de facto standard because of their dominant market share, they marginalize competitors that do not or cannot support the new extensions.
The U.S. Department of Justice, Microsoft critics, and computer-industry journalists claim that the goal of the strategy is to monopolize a product category. Such a strategy differs from J. Allard's originally proposed strategy of embrace, extend then innovate both in content and phases. Microsoft claims that the original strategy is not anti-competitive, but rather an exercise of its discretion to implement features it believes customers want.
Read more about this topic: Embrace, Extend And Extinguish
Famous quotes containing the word strategy:
“Our strategy in going after this army is very simple. First we are going to cut it off, and then we are going to kill it.”
—Colin Powell (b. 1937)
“... the generation of the 20’s was truly secular in that it still knew its theology and its varieties of religious experience. We are post-secular, inventing new faiths, without any sense of organizing truths. The truths we accept are so multiple that honesty becomes little more than a strategy by which you manage your tendencies toward duplicity.”
—Ann Douglas (b. 1942)