[laumars]

Internet Explorer on Macs back in the days of the IE / Navigator wars. Lotus document formats back before MS Office was the de facto standard.

And even just talking about .NET, that was only created to compete with Java after Sun to Microsoft to court over MS's own Java implementation (though granted it's since evolved into something much more). .NET was originally sold as but MS quickly lost interest in pushing it on non-Windows platforms. And then came Silverlight to compete with Flash; and the cross platform hopes for that followed a similar fate once it became obvious that Flash was no longer a competition.

But as I said in another comment, it's a common enough strategy - hardly something unique to Microsoft. It even has it's own coined term: Embrace, extend and extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish