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Comment by vikramkr | Hacker News Reader

Are there any good examples of embrace extend extinguish under nadella's tenure? I keep seeing this meme everywhere (including in this thread) but git is doing fine, Linux is doing fine. The only notable things I've seen extinguished are their own windows phone and phone hardware platforms.

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Extinguish, I have no examples. But Embrace and Extend, here is a possible one. Not saying I think this is a case of the first two E's necessarily but I know other people have pointed it out.

1. Build WSL2 and incorporate Linux kernel into Windows with great integration. 2. Add DirectX and GPU acceleration support for Linux that works in WSL2 only and not in regular Linux: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-GU....

These two steps could certainly be looked at as Embrace and Extend, although I admittedly fail to see how they could take an Extinguish step from here.

Well, the way directx on wsl works is it redirects dxgkrnl escapes/ioctls to host windows system something not possible on native Linux.

Well, that doesn't matter in the end. Part of extend is to take whatever you embraced, and add things you cannot do. So it's a success in that sense. Seems you're trying to put it as "What can Microsoft do if Linux doesn't support it?" when they can, if they want to, do plenty about it.

I think you're wrong there, bringing dxgkrnl to Linux would have been a much more involved process instead of just providing a redirect.

dxgkrnl is by far the heaviest NT module afaik.

> bringing dxgkrnl to Linux would have been a much more involved process instead of just providing a redirect

Of course, that's how collaboration works. Instead of going the harder but "improving the entire ecosystem" way, Microsoft chose the easiest + the one where they can extend stuff in a non-compatible way.

The way you look, you'll find malice in every little thing.

I thought they wanted to bring DX natively to Linux as well but got rejected. That would be an extend that easily leads to extinguish. You get Linux application developers to use the proprietary API to build stuff, then reduce support for everything but "MS Linux". This is why people need to be vigilant about the freedom of the entire stack.

Over time we may see MS playing nice, but there really is no value to FLOSS developers in having a closed source graphics API on Linux.

DirectX on Wine on native Linux seems to work okay already. GPU on Linux is a seriously mixed bag, but this is largely nVidia’s fault, not Microsoft’s. GPU on Windows works okay because Microsoft is willing to play the let-nVidia-do-whatever-it-wants game on Windows. GPU on Mac is a bit dicey because Apple seems to be unwilling to play this game.

nVidia gets away with this garbage on Linux because (as I understand it) they have strong-armed enough vendors into bending over backwards to support their driver model. The result is that nVidia can tell end users to either put up with constant breakage or to use of several not-really-upstream-kernel-based distros to get something stable enough to support the driver properly. Sadly, nVidia has the market power to pull this off.

I would love to see a big enough consortium (e.g. Red Hat, SuSE, Citrix, Oracle AMD Canonical) tell nVidia to buzz off. If all of those vendors dropped support for out-of-tree kernel GPU drivers and instead tracked upstream more closely for improved in-tree support, AMD and Intel would get a boost and nVidia might have to change its tune. And the vendors could stop wasting engineering resources to keep nVidia working. Users get easier-to-work-with systems. Everyone except nVidia wins.

Embracing and extending something, with no possible way to extinguish cannot be seen as steps one and two of an embrace, extend, extinguish strategy. That makes no sense at all

Agreed! Embracing is purely positive. Extending can be negative, but it generally isn't frowned upon. Heck, it's one of the reasons for FOSS existing!

Extinguish is the only purely negative part, people seem to forget that...

The extend stage was always some sort of small convenience that would be only in microsoft's version of a standard so that when people used a standard language or tool on windows, switching platforms would eventually get bogged down with changes and problems, keeping people locked in.

The fax machine was still a core part of business life back when embrace-extend-extinguish was a thing.

It's hard to tell whether those who continue to fixate on this 20-year-old trope are cranky senior citizens who'd otherwise be yelling at people to stay off their lawns or young zealots pining for the days of a long-past battle they were born too late to actually participate in.

The rest of us disposed of our fax machines and rotary dial telephones and moved on as the tech landscape, including 100% of the leadership at Microsoft, continued to turn over as happens with time.

Hell hath no fury like nerds scorned.

Those examples don't count as extinguished. The idea is that they would start by interoperating with an open standard, then they would make their version of the standard that has features they are not sharing, then they would convince companies/users to only use their version of the standard.

This is why we had so many websites designed specifically for IE6, and why many people are currently wary of that trend in Google/Chrome.

Github was already in the middle of their own version of EEE before Microsoft took over, so I don't know if you could blame them for that.

The thing is that quite a few of us were personally inconvenienced by Microsoft not supporting standards properly. When someone comes along and tells us that the stove hasn't burned anyones hand in over a decade, it doesn't mean that we're suddenly going feel comfortable touching it.

AppGet?

https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/28/21272964/microsoft-winget...

That's called being Sherlocked, I think.

That was discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23331287

The summary is Microsoft didn't copy anything; The app is trivial and the dev got a lot of free exposure for his startup. [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23341302

I thought maybe there was a risk with C# tooling or Xamarin but so far they seem to be keeping up Linux and Mac support. Windows is still the lead platform but I think I can live comfortably with this level of cross platform effort.

They updated the Linux .net profiling tools and are committed to a cross platform UI solution.

Nadella seems to be largely hands off W.R.T any funding / acquisitions. AFAIK, LinkedIn is still operating independently, Github too.

Since the acquisition I think LinkedIn is just starting to make moves towards even using Azure.

Both companies use Microsoft products instead of their own or from 3rd party companies. On the surface, they are independent companies. Hotmail was also independent company at start, now it is tightly integrated into Microsoft. Even Xbox was independent previously.

Maybe in a decade or so, when they think they could create a profit model from their integration, they would become Microsoft LinkedIn and Microsoft OneHub something.

?> Both companies use Microsoft products instead of their own

This seems like quite a bold statement. From the outside, both LinkedIn and Github use plenty of their own products / 3rd party solutions.

Neither of those could really be counted as "extinguished" though. Hotmail evolved into Outlook, and Xbox is doing quite well. Those seem like pretty solid outcomes.

Not sure if this qualifies but there’s this[0] embarrassing (to say the least) technical decision.

[0] https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2016/08/19/removing-the-powershe...

Didn't they change their mind in the end?

https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell-RFC/issues/16#issue...

@kuldeepdhaka the aliases have been removed from PowerShell Core 6.0 for awhile now

It’s hard to comment on this charitably, but why did anyone think this was ever a good idea, and why resist fixing it? I believe you’re correct though, it was ultimately fixed.

Well, they would have broken compatibility for their existing users, which sucks, too.

Atom, it's slowly dying with now only bug fixes. Language Servers which were open to all ides but newer versions restricted to their own ides and code editors. I think you would see many similar scenarios.

They are trying hard to extinguish Google Chrome on Windows too. That's your embrace, extend and extinguish.

It's only practical from business perspective to extinguish competitors. Imo, when their open source software have monopoly they would update license slowly. Let's face it, even if you fork the code afterwards there wouldn't be users and contributors to maintain it unless it's revolutionary. You could take example from Cloud9 IDE, BitTorrent etc.

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