Google’s variant of Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish is Clone, Eliminate Revenue, and Extinguish. And that is the extinguish phase.Īs a result, today, Office is still dominant and, while Microsoft is being undercut in some areas by Google Docs, for the most part, it continues to successfully defend its market even though Google Docs is demonstrating the embrace phase of the strategy against Office. Then it aggressively marketed the result so that Lotus 1-2-3 and its late competitive response to Office, Symphony, were driven out of the market. Then, it not only increased Exchange functionality, it wrapped it with Office. The company basically reverse engineered Lotus 1-2-3 so that scripts, basically the apps of the day, would run on Exchange. This is exactly what Microsoft did with Lotus.
#EMBRACE EXTEND EXTINGUISH ANDROID#
So it can’t just license Android it has to come up with a strategy that gets the developers, too. However, unlike BlackBerry, Microsoft is in the tools and platform business and while it too makes management platforms, it does care who owns the developers. So the PRIV showcases the value of what Ballmer suggested. I believe, had it done this five years ago, its market share would be far higher and this device would be even better. Suddenly, it has a phone that is attractive to the kind of audience it used to serve. By using Android, it gave up about 10 percent of what folks really cared about on its platform and got 100 percent of what folks wanted in a personal phone. It never really made money off of its old operating system and its new OS, QNX, really should be focused on its big industrial markets and the Internet of Things. Now, BlackBerry makes money off phones and its mobile management and security solutions for business. While it isn’t as secure as a BB10 device nor does it have the most compelling BB10 feature yet, Blend, it arguably is the most secure Android device and it works brilliantly.
It runs all the Android apps, it is relatively secure, and it has the keyboard that I used to think I couldn’t live without. I’ve been using the BlackBerry PRIV for around a month now and it is by far my favorite phone. My top current example is the Blackberry PRIV.īlackberry’s Powerful Though Late Strategy with PRIV Maybe Ballmer is right and it is time to dust off that old strategy and bring it back into play.
Google, not Microsoft, is the big scary company on the block. I’ve been thinking about this over the weekend and I realized that one of the curiosities of the last couple of decades is that Microsoft has been afraid to execute its strategy ever since it got hit by a successful and huge anti-trust challenge in the late 1990s. Since Microsoft created this strategy and also defended most successfully against it, there is likely no other company, other than a more focused Google staffed by ex-Microsoft folks, that could do it better.
#EMBRACE EXTEND EXTINGUISH WINDOWS#
Last week, Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s ex-CEO, suggested that Microsoft do something similar with Android apps on Windows Phone.
Now, iOS arguably, from the standpoint of profit generation, remains stronger than Android today. But, as with all things, Google seemed to lose interest and momentum. It came in as a virtual copy of iOS and did Apple a lot of damage. It’s interesting that, in many ways, Android represented an incomplete version of Microsoft’s Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish strategy, used so successfully against Lotus in the 1980s.
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