Then EVERY single other business of its size has a strategy that looks like "Embrace". The only difference is that Microsoft had a memo leak.

... which is exactly the problem. The issue is the tactic, not the company employing it. It’s just this company has a serious habit of employing those tactics, hence the distrust.

I'd like anyone in any business contemplating an Embrace, Extinguish strategy to know that it ends in people not trusting your company and being unwilling to work with your services.

I would like to know how much it is costing Microsoft to fix that damaged reputation so that other executives will know if they do this it will end up costing at least X amount.

Hmm... I would think that it will cost Microsoft a rethinking of their business strategy.

If their 'Embrace' looks like 'Yes we are compatible with...' and their 'Extend' like 'If you use our layer you can also do...' then people stay sceptical.

Instead their 'Embrace' should be 'How can we help you with your open source product?' and their 'Extend': 'Here are patches that fixes problems, improves performance and implement community wanted features.'

It seems companies like this always try to hold the door to 'Extinguish' open.

I really don't think reputational damage in this case came from adopting an embrace-and-extend strategy as such, but rather the monopolistic position they were in combined with specific tactics they used.

That might be the reason why many people dislike all businesses of Microsoft's size. I for one wouldn't be happy if Google or Amazon or Apple bought Github either.

I completely agree. The biggest issue here is that we are losing a neutral player as the top comment says. The tech world is that much more monopolistic without an independent GitHub.

The Memo leak was just the tip of the iceberg. MS also lost multiple court cases about their anticompetitive behaviour (for example gov of US, Sun) in that era.

Did you forget the Extend, Extinguish parts of the strategy, or are you just paraphrasing EEE to make it sound somewhat ok?

Pretty sure he means that just seeing symptoms of Embrace is not enough to sound the alarm that it's going to be extended and extinguished.

After all, what's the point of building software, if it's never embraced, aka, used?

The typical implication of "Embrace" in these EEE uses is not 'figure out how to work in tandem with' but more 'how can we the amoeba surround and prepare to Extinguish this'.

Hence the justified caution and monitoring of a known extinguisher.

> But let's not forget all of the moves toward a friendlier Microsoft/Linux world looks suspiciously like "Embrace"

“Embrace” is happening everywhere these days. Don’t sound the alarm until you see Extend.

Wsl is getting scarily close to Linux performance in benchmarks and improving fast. I don't see extend being too far away...

WSL has horrible horrible IO performance. It's really not going anywhere until they fix it, and the fix won't be easy

But they don't really need to fix it. Sure, it'd be nice, but they're targeting developer machines and utilities with WSL, not a server replacement of Linux. Nobody would buy a Windows license just to serve from LAMP stacks on WSL over Azure or something. Speed requirements for dev machines are a little less stringent, and as long as they are hitting better-than-Docker numbers, they will still be providing value.

Sidenote: looks like I/O performance is really not that bad in most cases already, and sometimes even faster than Linux distros like Ubuntu: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=wsl-febr...

It runs on Windows and can interop with Windows applications, that's already an extension by itself.

I am sure no one in the company has changed since that memo leaked in 1996...

Developers that exclusively use MS stack are very similar to those exclusive to Delphi. MS and Delphi stacks are very specific in nature and very different from everything else out there. Developers stepping out of those feel very uncomfortable and unfamiliar, thus wanting to stay in. Even though the Delphi stack is very obviously dying, the resistance is great, and many people stay on the sinking ship. MS stack is live and well which gives a viable incentive to never even look over the fence. That is the problem with developers exclusive in MS stack, they are not flexible and they don't want to be. They want everything to be done "the MS way". Where does that put GH? How will it change, in what direction (to accommodate the MS stack)?

> That is the problem with developers exclusive in MS stack, they are not flexible and they don't want to be. They want everything to be done "the MS way".

And unix developers complain endlessly about any dev environment that isn't identical to what they use. Powershell gets shit because it isn't bash/core-utils (even though it's better in just about every conceivable way), Windows API gets shit for not being posix (even though posix is a crappy API), etc.

Delphi might be a small community compared to JVM or MS. Is Delphi dying?

I work in the M/Mumps space(healthcare), another small (almost invisible) but active community and it seems far from dying. I imagine Delphi is bigger.

I wonder how long the MS stack would last without the support of MS. Would the MS stack fare as well as the Ruby stack has without Microsoft’s massive investment in turning developers into sharecroppers? (Or salesforce, scala, unreal, php, erlang, etc.)

Personally, I wonder how ReactOS (www.reactos.org) will affect things when it finally gets to the point of being usable for general population end users.

Seems like a wild card entry, which could go any number of directions. :)

How does this personally affect you such that you consider it your duty to disparage whole groups of developers for the choices that they make ?

Did it ever occur to you that people stick with certain environments because they make a lot of money using them ?

Your statement basically reads as "I can't believe that people/companies have the nerve to stick with a codebase that cost them thousands of dollars to create and has made them very successful over the last couple of decades..."