Comment by giancarlostoro

17 hours ago

Little harder to pull that off when the key components are all GPL licensed, but also all of Microsoft's bits and pieces for their distro seem to be MIT Licensed. Honestly, it certainly feels more like Google lives by Embrace, Extend, Extinguish (email, browsers, video streaming, etc).

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giancarlostoro

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saghm  16 hours ago

You cited three of the most prominent counterexamples to the common meme about Google killing their products as evidence of them extinguishing things. I'm not saying you're wrong necessarily, but I don't think you've demonstrated what you think you have.

  • brokencode  16 hours ago

    The “extinguish” part refers to your competition, not to your own product.

    You embrace a popular open standard, add new features to your software that build upon the standard (but are proprietary), then watch as your competitors die off because customers become locked into your proprietary features.

    Similar to how Apple hijacked SMS to add iMessage and introduced all kinds of features and the blue/green bubble styling.

    For the longest time, they refused to support RCS, trying to keep people on iPhone by making texting between iOS and Android suck.

    Of course, a lot of people switched to third party messaging apps because of how much Apple was intentionally ruining texting, so now Apple has had to adopt RCS.

    So the “extinguish” part can be hard to pull off given sufficiently strong competition.

  • giancarlostoro  8 hours ago

    > common meme about Google killing their products as evidence of them extinguishing things.

    I don't think anyone mentioned Google killing their products? I think you misunderstood my reference that was exclusively Microsoft[0] specific and has nothing to do with shutting down projects. Extinguish doesn't mean close it down in this context. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish was a phrase from some Microsoft exec or VP about embracing some open standard, extending it beyond what it does, and then extinguishing the competition.

    Google made Chrome, it was great, then they added things and features that sites often (VERY MUCH LIKE IE USED TO) say "You must use Chrome to visit this website." even when I'm on Firefox, and masking my browser agent enables the website. This is very "old evil" Microsoft like shennanigans.

    Google made gmail, people used to have email clients, hell AOL had its own built-in email client with a GUI and all. Now everyone browses email via a browser and is hooked to gmail.

    Before YouTube people used Kazaa, Shareazaa etc to share clips much like they do with YouTube, but now there's censorship and automatic censorship via copyright claims that the little guy cannot defend against. I follow amazingly good music YouTube channels that go deeply into how songs are made, which requires playing short samples, its 100% fair use, and gets me to listen to the original songs in many cases, but the record companies want to snag the easy cash so they're heavily discouraged since its time consuming work, fair use, and some goon at a Music company is jut flagging all their videos and profiting off someone else's hard work.

    There's also Android, which embraced Linux, extended it and extinguished the competition (Ubuntu phone anyone? You know, an ACTUAL Linux phone).

    There's also Google Talk / Google Voice / Google Chat / GChat (and the 5000 other names for it!) which was built on top of XMPP. I even tested logging into gmail once, and messaging my facebook account (FB Messenger used to be XMPP!) and it worked. They eventually shut down the openness of XMPP and closed them up (both Google and Facebook[2]).

    [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9266769