Embrace, Extend, Extinguish tactic, it is a tactic which usually done in the vendor side who implement the open standard. The concept is very simple, a company announces or inform the Standardization organization that they will implement the open standard in the products that they will going to produce in the market at the same time contribute resources that will enhance and develop the standards in which it is adopting. In simple word, the company Embrace the open standard. After the company embraces the standard, it is a common sense to the company that it will modify or add additional features to the product that comply to the standards. The features or addition is of course for proprietary purposes or to make their product unique from the other. It is natural for the company to gain profit from the products that they sell. It is legal to add and implement new features from the standards since it is open. In other words, the company Extends the capability of the standards for the good of the company. Now the scenario is that the additional features in w/c the company added is proprietary in nature, so cases occurs is that standards dominate the industry and sometimes became a de facto.
A very simple analogy of this scenario is a fire that is completely burned out by a fire extinguisher. The fire is the open standard and the fire extinguisher is the enhanced version of the standard.
Sad to say, this EEE tactic is usally done by large companies cause they can easily dominate the market because of their influence. EEE tactic will be an advantage to everybody if it is used for the welfare of others.
I think this tactic is one of the disadvantage of open standard in w/c organizations has no control at all. This tactic also in my opinion usually done by large companies in w/c becomes the yardstick of all vendors in the market. Large companies can easily monopolize the market by doing such tactic. I agree to the fact that adding additional features is a must for every company for proprietary and uniqueness reasons but there should be such limitations on how they will going to implement such features. Some are taking advantage of the availability of the standards. I think this is the challenge for every organizations and the government to fight and protect the interest of every vendors and users. This is the risk everyone should take for making a standard open...
More information on wikipedia.org
Extinguish part of the EEE tactic allows the vendor to completely monopolize the market. After a vendor or company embraces and add some additional features of the standard in which they adopt. Now there are cases that the enhanced implementation of the standard in nature become so popular in the industry which makes it a de facto standard. Since the standard is proprietary in nature, therefore the company can marginalize competitors from using that standard. Since this enhanced implementation is so popupal already in the market, the open standard in which its parent standard is now overlapped by this new standard. The open standard in which the new de facto standard is derived becomes obsolete since the new standard is tested to be very good.
A very simple analogy of this scenario is a fire that is completely burned out by a fire extinguisher. The fire is the open standard and the fire extinguisher is the enhanced version of the standard.
Sad to say, this EEE tactic is usally done by large companies cause they can easily dominate the market because of their influence. EEE tactic will be an advantage to everybody if it is used for the welfare of others.
I think this tactic is one of the disadvantage of open standard in w/c organizations has no control at all. This tactic also in my opinion usually done by large companies in w/c becomes the yardstick of all vendors in the market. Large companies can easily monopolize the market by doing such tactic. I agree to the fact that adding additional features is a must for every company for proprietary and uniqueness reasons but there should be such limitations on how they will going to implement such features. Some are taking advantage of the availability of the standards. I think this is the challenge for every organizations and the government to fight and protect the interest of every vendors and users. This is the risk everyone should take for making a standard open...
More information on wikipedia.org
yah, thats one disadvantage on the side of FOSS, there's a tendency of vendor lock in if we embrace the product of the certain vendor. One thing id observed also is that we embrace the products of Microsoft rather than, utilizing the FOSS.
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