- Embrace: Microsoft would adopt a popular, non-proprietary standard. This created an image of being a good actor in the industry and provided interoperability with competitors' products.
- Extend: Microsoft would then add proprietary features to its own implementation of that standard. These extensions would only work with other Microsoft products.
- Extinguish: As the extensions became widely used, they would become a de facto standard, making the original, truly open standard less relevant. Competitors would either have to license Microsoft's technology or lose compatibility with the most popular implementations, effectively "extinguishing" the original standard's relevance.
