I guess we can gauge how much embrace+extend+extinguish MS is doing by whether Atom gets winded down or goes into maintenance mode. I know it's not as popular as VSCode is now, and development has slowed since it burst onto the scene, but if anyone at Github actively works on Atom maybe those people should be worried about being reassigned.
For Microsoft, the text editor market is not something they need to dominate, but they absolutely do need positive developer mindshare. Why would they possibly care about extinguishing the competition?
You're not going to convince me that EEE applies to text editors for pushing Azure. Decisions on what Cloud platform to use are not made by a developer's choice of text editor, but by executives over fancy dinners, or the CEO's personal favourite in a startup.
But developers sometimes are or become CTOs or technical decision makers. These two statements are contradictory:
> For Microsoft, the text editor market is not something they need to dominate, but they absolutely do need positive developer mindshare. Why would they possibly care about extinguishing the competition?
> You're not going to convince me that EEE applies to text editors for pushing Azure. Decisions on what Cloud platform to use are not made by a developer's choice of text editor, but by executives over fancy dinners, or the CEO's personal favourite in a startup.
For positive developer mindshare, every little bit matters. For pushing Azure adoption, every little bit matters. New generations of developers using VSCode in coding bootcamps and undergraduate courses will keep the habit of using VSCode for a very long time. One click deploy-to-Azure plugins that works just that little bit better than the equivalent deploy-to-<somewhere else> or with remote development functionality will combine with the loss-leader that is cloud credits to make it just that little bit easier to choose Azure. Just that little bit of better integration with Github and NPM.
All of this seems far fetched, but it's how you build market share from behind. Microsoft is in it for the long haul, even if the pace is glacial, progress is progress. Again, it's not necessarily bad for every involved developer, it will definitely be great for most in terms of productivity or other benefits. Microsoft's incentives must be aligned with getting rid of the competition if possible, it's how for-profit public companies work, but before that's even possible, they need mind-share -- you can't just buy mind-share, you have to build it sometimes.
> "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.
This also seems to be a perfect description of what chrome is doing with internet standards -- I wonder how common this exact strategy is in business, even if they don't call it EEE
People who've been around for a while have been arguing for years that Chrome is doing exactly what Microsoft did with IE back in the day and a browser market dominated by Chrome and Chrome-a-likes is not healthy.
Sadly, too many people haven't been around for long enough to have seen it all before, and they fall for the new shiny every time. Then we get a few years of bad results where one product dominates and that part of the industry only evolves in the directions that suit the business controlling that one product, until eventually sufficient opposition has built up that a viable competitor is produced and we start to move forward again.
I agree, which is why I referred to it as "google-chrome-ing" (very awkward term) in my original post.
The Chrome teams (the ones that deal with standards, improving chrome, etc) are certainly filled with good people trying to improve the web, but there is such a conflict of interest there with a more open web or a web with certain features. Those employees are obligated to be on the wrong side of those discussions in really insidious/subtle ways sometimes, and those at the level at which strategy is conducted have a clearer view but have an even stronger incentive.
I don't see how this is related to what Chrome is doing. What Web APIs have been implemented in Chrome that are available as proprietary closed source only? Looking at Google's wiki, I do not see any APIs that are omitted from Chromium:
You say this as if Atom is some sort of widely used standard. Atom and VSCode are just two players in a wide ecosystem of editors and IDEs, most of which Microsoft has no control over. And I'd bet that most people using other tools (e.g. Visual Studio, JetBrains IDEs, Vim, Emacs) have very little inclination to switch to Atom or VSCode.
I guess we can gauge how much embrace+extend+extinguish MS is doing by whether Atom gets winded down or goes into maintenance mode. I know it's not as popular as VSCode is now, and development has slowed since it burst onto the scene, but if anyone at Github actively works on Atom maybe those people should be worried about being reassigned.