Embrace, extend, and extinguish

"Embrace, extend, and extinguish" (EEE), also known as "embrace, extend, and exterminate", is a phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice found that was used internally by Microsoft to describe its strategy for entering product categories involving widely used standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and then using those differences in order to strongly disadvantage its competitors.
Origin.
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", 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, and in an interview of Steve Ballmer by "The New York Times".
The variation, "embrace, extend and extinguish", was first introduced in the "United States v. Microsoft Corp." antitrust trial when then vice president of Intel, Steven McGeady, used the phrase 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".
Strategy.
The strategy's three phases are:
Microsoft has claimed that the original strategy is not anti-competitive, but rather an exercise of its discretion to implement features it believes customers want.
Variant.
An older variant of the phrase is "embrace, extend then innovate" in J Allard's 1994 memo "Windows: The Next Killer Application on the Internet" to Paul Maritz and other executives at Microsoft. The memo starts with a background on the Internet in general, and then proposes a strategy on how to turn Windows into the next "killer app" for the Internet:
Companies other than Microsoft.
During the browser wars, other companies besides Microsoft introduced proprietary, non–standards-compliant extensions. For example, in 1995, Netscape implemented the "font" tag, among other HTML extensions, without seeking review from a standards body. With the rise of Internet Explorer, the two companies became locked in a dead heat to out-implement each other with non–standards-compliant features. In 2004, to prevent a repeat of the "browser wars", and the resulting morass of conflicting standards, the browser vendors Apple Inc. (Safari), Mozilla Foundation (Firefox), and Opera Software (Opera browser) formed the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) to create open standards to complement those of the World Wide Web Consortium. Microsoft refused to join, citing the group's lack of a patent policy as the reason.