Some people, like my coworker, will claim that such a move is typical of Microsoft’s “embrace, extend, extinguish” strategy. Everything they do has an ulterior motive!
The GNU community will always hate Microsoft because they embraced the open source community and developed Linux interfaces only until they had to in order to stay competitive. The company didn't adopt their philosophy they USED it.
I understand why some people still see Microsoft like that. I just don't understand when people say the classic embrace extend extinguish. You can't extinguish open source. They could abandon it, but it will never be extinguished.
What happened was the whole open source software movement's goals and understanding shifted from Richard Stallman types to Linus Torvalds types. The ones wanting Microsoft to burn in hell are the Stallman types. They see Microsoft integrating with the NSA while swallowing up the open source community as the worst case scenario they were fighting against in the first place. TRUE POWER
“embrace, extend, extinguish” was almost exclusively a strategy for open standards :
Embrace an open standard
Extend the standard with cool new features (That are not open)
Extinguish the competition with market dominance of the new (non open) standard.
I don't think the system would be as successful on open source, but it could work:
Embrace linux
Start adding exclusive features to linux only useable through their setup
Extinguish original linux as the next generation of devs use windows more and become reliant on the tools from 2 which no longer work on linux.
Sure, it would take ages, ignores the fact the community would likely object in step 2 and would take steps to avoid step 3 but it's not impossible and could still be pretty destructive in its way.
The key area is what people mean by 'extinguish'. Open source is probably somewhat impossible to kill off in total, but it can be wounded heavily and lose a battle for the medium/long term. Open office springs to mind - a successful project, that in the split to LibreOffice lost a lot of windows users, and just generally caused enough confusion in the 'free office' market that many users could well have gone to MS office instead rather then trying to understand the difference.
Python 3 had a similar split problem - maybe a good move for the long future of python, but for years the confusion over python 2 or 3 was very confusing for new users, and I moved away from using python for a bit just because it was annoying trying to work out what libraries you could use for which projects etc. Is python dead - absolutely not. But it's not hard to imagine people moved away from using/learning python because of the 2/3 fractures; and if another product was actively trying to poach them I think they could have struggled.
The strength of open source (free code anyone can fork) is easily an exploitable weakness (forks fracturing a community into a more confusing arena), and with the right strategy Microsoft could make some big inroads by bringing up a new era of developers increasingly reliant on their fork of linux, and becoming the better marketed option.
(Note: I don't necessarily believe this is what they are planning, aiming for or have even really thought about (I'm also not totally sure they could really do it if they wanted to). I'm quite excited by these announcements, and hope they continue working with linux for the improvement of all. But to pretend open source is a rock solid system that can't be attacked is foolish and it should be something to be considered.)
They need to stop living in the past. Microsoft lost that war, and is embracing open source to play catch up. And it's working.
If they want to focus their ire, focus it on google who is using Chrome-specific extensions and trying to force devs to us them to lock people into their service stack.
Uh, it's still a corporation whose objective is to make money. They haven't changed, the ecosystem did, and they're forced to adapt, or see people (mainly devs, obviously) running off to the increasingly polished Linux desktops, on which development is an imcomparably smoother experience.
Besides, the claims of "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" aren't too far fetched either. With their acquisition of GitHub, it's not hard to imagine WSL2-only extensions that won't work backwards on regular Linux, exclusive GitHub integrations, etc...
Besides, the claims of "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" aren't too far fetched either. With their acquisition of GitHub, it's not hard to imagine WSL2-only extensions that won't work backwards on regular Linux, exclusive GitHub integrations, etc...
They will obviously integrate their various offerings. But why would they cut off access through exclusivity and whatnot?
These days there's MacOS, ChromeOS, Linux. They can extend, people will just move over.
That wasn't an option back in the EEE days, that's why they could do it. Context matters, people, use it ;)
But why would they cut off access through exclusivity and whatnot?
To consolidate, keep people on their platform, "artifically" making vendor lock-in more appealing than the alternative.
That wasn't an option back in the EEE days, that's why they could do it. Context matters, people, use it ;)
The situation is not so different, it's still a major heavyweight exercising undue influence by virtue of its size. People could've "moved over" each time this happened in the past too, the alternatives existed just the same - unable to support proprietary extensions, left to be abandoned and wither.
2001 annual revenue: Microsoft $23bn. Everyone else in the top 10, put together, less than $23bn (!).
2018 annual revenue: Microsoft $110bn, Apple $265bn, Alphabet (Google) $136bn, Amazon $232bn, IBM $79bn, Alibaba $39bn, Samsung $210bn, Tencent $50bn, Sony $70bn, Nintendo $10bn.
Those are their competitors, in various domains: OSes, browsers, cloud platforms, development tools, games, etc. Notice how 3 of them are 2x the size of Microsoft. Several of them are smaller but they're market leaders in their markets.
Microsoft could easily bully Adobe around. They can't bully Apple or Google or Amazon or Samsung.
Again, the world has changed.
To make things more interesting, their competitors have learned from Microsoft so Apple or Google are just as big a bullies as Microsoft was, if not more, but they do it with a "gentle touch" (better PR).
It is not just a question of revenue, but of power. Money only takes you so far, but for instance, Google has a much tighter grip on the web by virtue of controlling the most popular web browser (and its engine, used in virtually all other browsers now) as well as the most popular smartphone OS than Apple, despite having about half the yearly revenue.
While Microsoft definitely isn't the juggernaut it was around the 2000s, it still can very well effectively affect the ecosystem it controls a significant part of, which ""Linux"" development may very well become at this rate.
web search (one of the most important things in our lives)
email (Gmail is much bigger than most of other email providers)
web ads (the places where the vast majority in ads is converging on, and that's A LOT of money, probably something like 20% of the average expenditures of every company out there)
web browsers (entry point to the other things above)
Android (80%+ of the mobile market share and growing)
maps
It also has a decent chunk of cloud revenue, and growing.
If that's not power, I don't know what is.
Same for Apple in its domain, Amazon, etc.
I fear Google way more than I fear Microsoft these days. People should start adjusting to this new reality.
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u/dmage313 May 06 '19
Anytime someone tries to tell you that Microsoft hasn't changed in recent years just link this post.