#Embrace extend extinguish software#
#Embrace extend extinguish Pc#

Microsoft had officially extinguished Lotus 1–2–3. Meanwhile, Symphony - the Lotus integrated package for MS-DOS that aimed to compete with Office - never prospered and was eventually abandoned. No need to buy a standalone package like Lotus 1–2–3.

#Embrace extend extinguish software#

Microsoft sharpened their competitive edge with company discounts and clever Office 95 marketing, and as a result, most major businesses were adopting it as their standardized software suite - and Excel was part of the bundle. By 1995, these programs were working together well, and although there were a number of word processors to choose from, there weren’t any compelling competitors for Excel on Windows. Next, Microsoft extended by creating Office: the holy trinity of Excel, Word, and Powerpoint, all running together on Windows. This was a leap ahead of standard MS-DOS packages like Lotus 1–2–3. What’s more, Microsoft used the graphics capabilities of Macs to equip Excel with a cool GUI. So close, in fact, that people could switch from Lotus to Excel with minimal pain. The functionality of Excel was as similar to Lotus as it could be without being a blatant rip-off. Enter Excel, a spreadsheet program that initially ran on Macs. This meant it had to load Lotus files and the macros that came with them. To overcome Lotus, Microsoft knew it had to embrace what made the product unique.

#Embrace extend extinguish Pc#

It was the classic killer app for the IBM PC and Microsoft’s MS-DOS operating system. Microsoft famously coined the phrase “embrace, extend, extinguish” to describe their strategy for dominating markets where competitors benefited from open standards.īack in the day, the most powerful PC software package was Lotus 1–2– 3. They were modifying a standard so that it would only run with their software. Because only Netscape Navigator knew what to do with, and only Internet Explorer knew what to do with. There’s no problem with that (apart from lousy aesthetics), right? Wrong.

During the first browser wars, Netscape proposed a tag, while Microsoft came up with, which was meant to cause text to scroll in various directions. The HTML specification has evolved over the years, and the W3C acts as a forum for gaining specification consensus from large players such as Adobe, Apple, Google, Intel, and Microsoft.īut there’s been a history of skirmishes, with different companies proposing their own variants. Take HTML, the standard language for writing web pages, invented in the ’90s by Tim Berners-Lee. But sometimes, people try to game the system Now, imagine a universe in which you had to pay a $1 licensing fee every time you wanted to read or write a text file in ASCII. They unlock the transformative power of open source software.įor the English-speaking world, the underlying standard is ASCII, which sets down the rules for encoding the alphabet as 0s and 1s.

They make data open for any citizen to audit. Open standards make it possible for the smallest supplier to compete with the largest. And in the online sphere, this begins with open standards. Our modern world relies on people agreeing to work by common rules. “ the nice thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from.” In fact, a few of them: as Andy Tanenbaum said,

It’s rare because hardware manufacturers and software developers have agreed on a standard. Of course, once in a while, I have login problems, or poor data speeds - but it’s rare. Their lattes are strong and the wifi is speedy. I’m sitting in my favorite coffee shop as I write this.