Embrace, Extend, and … Copilot? (Premium)

The phrase “embrace and extend” was long synonymous with Microsoft, but it’s also widely misunderstood and unfairly vilified as a strategy. Worse, it’s been mischaracterized as “embrace, extend, and extinguish” and “embrace, extend, and exterminate,” largely by Microsoft’s competitors. Which makes sense, in a way, since “embrace and extend” isn’t even the version of this phrase that kicked off the controversy in the first place.

“Embrace and extend” allegedly originated with Bill Gates. But it was Gates’s regular use of this term that caused Microsoft engineer J Allard to riff off it for his seminal 1994 internal memo, “Windows: The Next Killer Application on the Internet.”

He called it “embrace, extend, and innovate.” And this memo was part of a plea to get Bill Gates and the company’s other leaders to wake up and address the competitive threat posed at the time by the Internet and its newest and friendliest interface, the World Wide Web.

He recommended a phased approach.

“To build the necessary respect and win the mindshare of the Internet community, I recommend a recipe not unlike the one we’ve used with our TCP/IP efforts: embrace, extend, then innovate,” he wrote. “Although we are years behind many of our competitors on the Internet, our agility and creativity will allow us to catch up quickly.”

In the first “embrace” phase, Microsoft would need to understand the “strange culture” of the Internet, with its roots in UNIX, to “determine the needs and the trends of the user base” so it could deliver products that met the community’s needs. Key among them the coming versions of Windows, 95 and NT 3.5x, and new Internet navigation tools and servers.

In phase two, “extend,” the company would “establish relationships with the appropriate organizations and corporations with goals similar to ours” and deliver “well-integrated tools and services compatible with established and popular standards developed [by] the Internet community.” Here, Microsoft would embrace the (then) current Internet technologies in Windows and integrate standard Internet tools and services into its base products.

And in the final phase of this “Internet onion,” as he called it, Microsoft would need to “innovate” to move into a leadership role in the creation of new Internet standards. It would create “off-the-shelf” software built with “Internet awareness,” which probably sounded pretty radical at the time. And Windows would become “the next-generation Internet tool of the future,” fulfilling the title of Allard’s memo, “the next killer application for the Internet.”

None of that sounds even remotely malicious to me. Indeed, the “extend” phase sounds like more another round of “embrace.” In effect, he was talking about Microsoft becoming part of a community that already existed and then eventually assuming a leadership role that respe...