[nl]

No.

Embrace & Extend is a well known, very destructive mechanism for subverting standards.

Enhancing existing standards with experimental extensions is a well known very useful mechanism for improving widely used standards.

As with anything to do with technology you need to look at the details to determine exactly what is happening on a case-by-case basis.

Just saying "that sounds like MS" isn't useful without examining the details. For example, many of Microsoft's extensions to HTML were very useful (eg, XMLHTTPRequest), whereas others weren't. It's a case-by-case thing, and asserting this is always bad is a very shallow interpretation.

TL;DR: Details matter. Experimenting by extending standards isn't always bad.

[yuhong]

Yea, I have to come to think that embrace and extend is not the worst thing MS did. For example, extending ODF would be far less bad than creating OOXML.

[tzs]

Extending ODF was not possible because Sun would not allow it. Sun's IP licenses for ODF effectively gave them veto power over attempts to add things to ODF that they did not approve, so that was the end of that. Sun's position was that ODF would support exactly the feature set needed by StarOffice.

If you ignore IBM's and Sun's massive FUD campaigns against OOXML, and actually compare the specs, you'll find that OOXML is not anywhere near as bad as they claimed, and in many ways is better than ODF. ODF does have nicer markup--I'd much rather read or write by hand an ODF file. On the other hand, ODF is incomplete in major areas, and other areas are imprecise. (Sun and IBM actually tried to use this as a point in their FUD campaign, slamming OOXML for having too much detail).

[ZeroGravitas]

It's seems likely that Sun's IP licence was specifically written to stop Microsoft from doing its well documented embrace, extend, extinguish routine on ODF like they did to Sun's Java. Instead they just emrbraced, extended and extinguished the entire idea of a standard XML office format. Nice work.

Weirdly, Microsoft seem to have incompatibly forked their own OOXML format and are in no rush to fix that now that they've seen off the competitive threat posed by ISO standardisation of a competing format.

[tzs]

StarOffice and Microsoft started work on XML formats at around the same time, and most of the subsequent histories are largely parallel. There was no EEE here.