content: They've been perfecting this behavior for 25+ years. Many businesses and people have been trashed because of them. From Wikipedia: The strategy and phrase "embrace and extend" were first described outside Microsoft in a 1996 article in The New York Times titled "Tomorrow, the World Wide Web! Microsoft, the PC King, Wants to Reign Over the Internet",[5] in which writer John Markoff said, "Rather than merely embrace and extend the Internet, the company's critics now fear, Microsoft intends to engulf it." The phrase "embrace and extend" also appears in a facetious motivational song by an anonymous Microsoft employee,[6] and in an interview of Steve Ballmer by The New York Times.[7] The variation, "embrace, extend and extinguish", was first introduced in the United States v. Microsoft antitrust trial when then vice president of Intel, Steven McGeady, used the phrase[8] to explain Microsoft vice president Paul Maritz's statement in a 1995 meeting with Intel that described Microsoft's strategy to "kill HTML by extending it".[9][10]