The term “Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish” is often thrown about whenever someone is upset with Microsoft. Superficially it describes any attempt by a technology company to attract users of a competitor’s product, but the actual strategy is more complicated than that. In this report we will use Azure Cosmos DB to illustrate the concept.
Embrace
The first step is to embrace the competitor’s standards. In the 80’s and 90’s this meant having the ability to read and write their file formats. For example, MS Word needed to be able to open, modify, and save WordPerfect documents flawlessly.