The parent is probably having flashbacks to a time now long gone, in which Microsoft was widely regarded in tech circles as the evil empire. They would attempt to 'embrace and extend' potentially threatening (to them) technology that they didn't control, as a means to hijack or kill it. Many people - including internally at Microsoft - often called it: embrace, extend, extinguish:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish