I led the development of a large GUI app using J++ in the late 90s. This fear you describe is unwarranted.
It's worth pointing out that the list of examples of "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" on the wikipedia page of that name [1] contains zero actual successful examples of it working. Perhaps you have noticed that you aren't reading this page in an ActiveX control.
> It's worth pointing out that the list of examples of "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" on the wikipedia page of that name [1] contains zero actual successful examples of it working.
Looks like the successful examples were successful enough for everybody to forget about the originals. There is basically no other YP/Kerberos/SMB implementation in use that didn't follow from the MS copy. Netscape was successfully lead to bankruptcy. All the EEE days platform independent dev-tools were successfully lead to bankruptcy. All the EEE days competing office suites were successfully lead to bankruptcy...
SMB seems alive and well? I don't see an "Extinguish" there.
You seem to be conflating "beat in the marketplace" with EEE. Netscape didn't fail because of ActiveX. They failed because web browsers and web servers became free.
Competing office suites struggle not because Microsoft extended some underlying protocol. Like it or not (and I personally don't), Office delivers an incredible amount of business value to its users.
Platform independent dev-tools were, and are, still around. But like the browser, it's tough to make a living selling dev tools when they are generally free.
Microsoft has been a very successful company for many reasons. It's not clear that "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" is one of them.
As a contractor I have been a victim of _all_ the examples in that website (yes, even Interix. A company I used to work for immediately tried porting their software to Interix the moment it was released for free (I think XP?), and I still have nightmares to this day. God bless that guy who used to have a website with more recent GNU utilities for Interix). They only really succeeded in some of them (e.g. MSN, browser, email) but they definitely tried. Sometimes it was legal reasons that stopped them (e.g. Java) and not just their incompetence.
Their failure to take control over those markets is not the same as a failure to cause damage. They slowed down development of web standards by many many years, as one example.
It's worth pointing out that the list of examples of "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" on the wikipedia page of that name [1] contains zero actual successful examples of it working. Perhaps you have noticed that you aren't reading this page in an ActiveX control.
This is a boogeyman. Don't be afraid of it.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...