this post was submitted on 19 May 2025
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That's stretching the definition to the point it's nearly unrecognisable.
What the term meant was for things like Internet Explorer, where MS adopted an existing standard (Embrace), started changing it in incompatible ways (Extend), while using their market power to lock out competitors (Extinguish)
e.g. IE used an incompatible method for sizing and laying out elements than any other browser, so a site that laid out properly in NN4 looked broken in IE6, and vise versa. So most devs targeted IE6 as it was more popular, and NN4 users got more and more broken sites.
ACPI was similar, Windows had an extremely lax implementation of it, so motherboards often shipped with bugs that Windows would ignore but would stop anything else from booting. Intentional? Doesn't really matter, since it sure was helpful in slowing the adoption of things like Linux, that had to come up with workarounds for all the broken hardware.
Linux is a standard they have Embraced.
As a for-profit tech monopolist, they will, very predictably, Extinguish the ability of people who use WSL instead of just actually Linux... to be easily able to... fully transition to a competitor (Linux).
The Extend part just looks different, because the scope of software competition offered by Linux is much more vast than just a particular standard for a particular kind of software.
... Potato, potato.
I used to work for Microsoft.
The ethos is absolutely still there: Create vendor lock in, create ecosystem dependence in every way possible, as well as in ways that 99% of people would not even think are possible.
EEE is just the term they came up with to describe their own, overarching, monopolist general strategy, and if you wanna quibble over the precise technicalities of an internal corporate slogan, well then you'd be the kind of person MSFT is filled with that made me no longer want to work for them.