Oh enough of this meme, please. It should be required that anyone who tries to be clever with it actually justify it with a full explanation on what they think the three matching steps are/will be.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary justification.

EEE, astroturfing and similar bait and switch tactics has been so common for decades that some companies are guilty until proven innocent.

I disagree that EEE has been "so common for decades". It's a tactic Microsoft employed for some time and, as far as I can see, hasn't used since (not as a common strategy at the very least).

The only company I can think of that EEE-as-a-strategy might apply to is AWS, and I say this with huge reservations because their priority is still their customers.

It's step 1: embracing the open standard. They'll extend it next. Another commenter already pointed out that could be as easy as just using Bing to send revenue to them using Google's tech. They'll come up with other ideas.

Far as open-sourcing their stuff, I think they're holding off on that to preserve their profitable lock-in in legacy market. Harder to clone their key dependencies if the code isn't open. Even opening the data formats like for Office wasn't enough to make a copy that renders all existing documents perfectly. That was by design, too.

I think it makes more financial sense for them to keep existing stuff closed followed by Embrace with Microsoft-oriented Extend on open stuff. I doubt they'll Extinguish since they don't have enough clout to do that in this market. Probably in most markets now.

> Even opening the data formats like for Office

Ah the only second ISO Standard for the same thing. With transparent definitions like: if option XYZ is set, render the output like Word 97.

Blatant corruption by a standard gremium.