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by prometheon1 978 days ago
What we are seeing now could fit a timeline where Microsoft is doing EEE again, as well as a timeline where Microsoft is trying to change its ways.

Building VSCode, LSP and Typescript could still prove to be the Embrace and Extend phase. There are some worrying signs, e.g. many VSCode extensions built by MS don't work on open-source VSCode builds like code-server and VSCodium. From a business perspective, this makes sense, as GitHub Codespaces and vscode.dev now have features that are difficult to get in competitors. Maybe at some point they will try to Extinguish all local development and push everyone to use a cloud version of VSCode? (See e.g. Python integration in Excel)

The truth is probably a lot more complex, but we can't rule out anything yet.
2 comments
throwaway50182 978 days ago
By this logic, they are also currently Embracing and Extending Windows, Office, etc. This doesn't make sense to me. It's their original products, not something they embraced and plan on extinguishing.
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prometheon1 978 days ago
Windows and Office are both mentioned as products that are leveraged to do EEE on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

They are not extinguishing their own products, but using their products to extinguish alternatives. The example I mentioned actually fits the wikipedia definition quite well in my opinion.

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mjw1007 977 days ago
CSS was to a large extent a Microsoft project (when the time came to introduce stylesheets it was more-or-less Opera and Microsoft against Netscape, and Microsoft had many more users than Opera).

Nonetheless Microsoft managed to use CSS to achieve a great deal of user lock-in by refusing to conform to the standard they co-authored.

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throwaway50182 977 days ago
Well then that's clearly not EEE. There can be more predatory market strategies than just EEE.
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prometheon1 976 days ago
- Embrace the web with Internet Explorer.

- Extend the web with CSS as an open standard.

- Extinguish competition by being the main browser and not following the CSS standard.

Still follows the recipe quite well in my opinion.

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junon 978 days ago
Exactly this. It could be either one, but M$ has done zilch to earn goodwill from the community.
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