It might be when used now, but it was used by Microsoft internally at the time.
First part of that Wikipedia page:
> "Embrace, extend, and extinguish" (EEE), also known as "embrace, extend, and exterminate", is a phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice found was used internally by Microsoft to describe its strategy for entering product categories involving widely used open standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and using the differences to strongly disadvantage its competitors.
The MS of today is actively reaping the benefits of the EEE & openly shady business years.
Their behavioural changes can be framed as an intentional reformation, but also as exhausting high-value targets, losing monopolies, and settling into profitable equilibrium out of necessity.
Modern competitors to MS are effectively immune to MS-EEE, in some cases by being way better at every aspect of it (MS IE is now delivered by Google based on forked Apple tech, and Office uses React, for quick examples…). MS pivoted to Azure-entanglements for their entrenched customers, which remains highly profitable, but have also had a marked decrease in engineering clout in certain key areas and still have a fragmented client/GUI ecosystem.
I’d contend they haven’t changed, they’re just cornered in ways they never were before so we see different behaviour. If MS controlled iOS or Facebook or WebKit or Search we’d see more classic plays reminding us who owns what.
i'm speaking on behalf of myself. While yes, this was true back in then day, that is very much not the philosophy nowadays. it's a different company with different leadership than those days.
The 1.5M number includes non-corporate employees (warehouse). They likely included this number to soften the message. The corporate workforce is ~300K so this is actually ~4% of their workforce.
Siemens Energy (which meanwhile is completely separated from Siemens) did a massive cleanup of their management overhead two or three years ago. They cut several layers and a lot of managers got downgraded or let go. Looking at their stock performance it seems they did the right thing.
I really hope that other German enterprises will use this as an example.
As I was following Siemens Energy in these years, I remember them getting a huge bailout, or you can call it help or whatever, at one point and from there on the stock price started going up.
It was a government guarantee in November 2023, which was never used, but allowed them to borrow money from banks for new projects. Demand was never a problem, but they were on the brink of collapse due to hidden quality problems at their subsidiary Gamesa. Somehow they seem to have solved this.
It isn't. Stock price just measures investor confidence. Sometimes firing managers leads to more investor confidence. Most of the time it's a crapshoot but it's the best objective indicator we have for comparison.
It can also be a measure of other market factors. In the case of Siemens Energy the high demand for electricity generation capacity from AI certainly plays a role.
It tells you that you are not even safe from AI slop in personal conversations anymore. You think you are talking to a friend? Oh no, it's his personal AI assistant.
"iPhone" was an Infogear, later Cisco, trademark, for the InfoGear iPhone (1997--2000 / InfoGear, Cisco/Linksys 2006--2007), which was licenced to Apple.
I was at Cisco when the Apple iPhone was announced. It was rumored to be happening, so Cisco rushed out a Linksys VoIP(?) phone rebranded (it might have just been a sticker) as an "iPhone" so they could defend the trademark. They quickly reached an agreement with Apple. I remember they might have been getting their VPN included on the device. I'm sure there was a similar issue with iOS, and that caused me to get a lot of not-so-relevant emails from recruiters looking for mobile devs.
The weirder phone that they had was the ROKR in 2005. It was a collaboration with Apple and worked with iTunes. People say that it helped Apple get in the phone business, and helped Motorola become even more irrelevant in that space around this time.
I was very naive when I discovered his books as a child in my fathers bookshelf. Luckily my father told me that I should be careful not to take anything as "the truth" from any of Däniken's books. It helped me a lot with keeping the necessary scepticism while still enjoying the books and I was really grateful for this advice.
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