“Embrace and extend” (sometimes completed with “and extinguish”) was a phrase often used in the mid-’90s to describe Microsoft’s competitive strategy, even if it did not fully capture the reality of how it beat competitors. One of the most famous examples of it was how the company dealt with the rising threat of Netscape Navigator when that browser ruled the web. It embraced web standards and then launched proprietary extensions. While those extensions, e.g., ActiveX, didn't see broad adoption per se, Internet Explorer’s free availability and integration with Windows and other Microsoft products was enough to eventually cause Netscape’s demise. More recently, we’ve seen Microsoft take a similar approach with Teams versus Slack.
