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Comment by oblio | Hacker News Reader

They'll extinguish desktop Linux any day now!

It's funny because Linux did just that to Unix. Embrace (new OS that does everything Unix does, and free!), extend (Linux has features not found in classic Unixes), extinguish (Linux is now the de facto standard, so anyone who wants to use Unix is laughed at).

Microsoft gets mocked for embrace/extend/extinguish, but really, it means just do a better job than the competition. Embrace: "do what others are doing", extend: "do a better job at it, have more features than the competition", extinguish: "sell customers on those features and improvements". How anyone could be against competition, simply because it's framed in a cheesy phrase, is beyond me.

You can compete without working to convert an ecosystem from standardized to proprietary. If that happens it becomes much harder for anyone else to compete, and the end result is reduced competition.

That's what most companies do, though.

"Differentiate your product."

"Let's build an IP portfolio."

"We don't want to be the dumb pipe."

"Build a moat around the product."

"Don't let yourself be commoditized."

Etc.

All that coded or not so coded business language says the same thing: make it proprietary/uncopyable and make money off of it.

It's much less of an issue if you make your own new thing be proprietary. It causes problems when you co-opt an existing market. It really causes problems when you're devoting external resources to conquering the market and once you do so you stop caring very much about improving any more.

Commercial Unix extinguished themselves without much help from Microsoft. The Halloween documents were about Linux after all (over 20 years ago!).. the commercial Unix players have only themselves to blame. Unless we’re going to blame all the mistakes of DEC, HP and IBM on Microsoft. Like geez.... even if that’s true then frankly Microsoft deserved to win.

Commercial Unix suffered from a lack of vision. They could have made version to run on x86, but they basically conceded to the low end to Linux. They were too busy making money from selling super-expensive RISC-based machines.

Solaris had a good version, which I used for a time, while I was running a data center full of Sparc equipment. All the user space stuff was happening in Linux-land. Solaris x86 had a nice repo for various packages, but there was always something you wanted that wasn't there. It got really close, though.

If one of the bigs would have gotten serious about packaging up, say, Debian's userland stuff, they could have put a serious dent in Red Hat, and maybe things would have played out differently.

They were also thwarted by the GPL, had Linux never came into the scene, the BSDs would never been as big as Linux became.

If at all, they would just cherry pick stuff out of them as they were already doing anyway.

> How anyone could be against competition, simply because it's framed in a cheesy phrase, is beyond me.

Because you've entirely misunderstood what EEE means. It absolutely does NOT mean to "do a better job." That phased was coined SPECIFICALLY because it was how Microsoft either absorbed competitors, or put them out of business. They spent decades doing JUST ENOUGH to persuade people to use their stuff, even when it was NOT as good -- given the advantage of their monopoly position and vertical integration -- in order to starve the competition of oxygen.

And yet it still didn't work.

It didn't work perfectly. Microsoft's one of the biggest organisations in the world, remember.

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