> "Embrace, extend, and extinguish" (EEE),[1] also known as "embrace, extend, and exterminate",[2] is a phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice found[3] was used internally by Microsoft[4] to describe its strategy for entering product categories involving widely used standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and then using those differences in order to strongly disadvantage its competitors.
> 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.
Embrace: MS enters the lightweight editor (Atom) space with VSCode
Extend: MS extends VSCode with proprietary WSL/SSH/whatever code that they use their deep pockets to maintain and push people to VSCode ("it works better with WSL")
Extinguish: VSCode becomes the defacto standard. It remains to be seen whether Atom will be affected by this in actuality but it's already been supplanted in popular marketing IMO. VSCode is already more popular than Atom AFAIK.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace%2C_extend%2C_and_extin...