This seems like a very tortured extrapolation of what embrace/extend originally meant. They talk about Uber and Amazon but these are not implementing any open standards. Google has more of a history of this, but even there it’s not core to their strategy—they might be harming SMTP but they’re not going to kill it, nor is that key to their success.
If we’re just talking about offering more to attract customers in a growth phase then locking them in with some kind of market dominance then I agree that is the VC playbook, but let’s not water down the meaning of EEE to refer to that. Walmart has been doing it for decades.
>Google has more of a history of this, but even there it’s not core to their strategy—they might be harming SMTP but they’re not going to kill it[...]
Well, did you have an email server for your family, friends, and your small business? And someday your friend or customer using it reported that there's no incoming mail from Google nor their email to Gmail addresses aren't delivered. You check the reason and see that for Google - "because they fight spam" - your IP address seems to have a reputation not good enough for accepting email from your server.
No discussion, no reason revealed, no way to appeal, no human on the other side, and nothing can be done. Of course, you can outsource mail delivery to one of the big email operators - big enough that Google doesn't try to block them even if they allow for spamming.
This way the very idea of email as a common, freely available service is strangled step by step for years.
Right, that's what I was referring to. See also XMPP. But at the end of the day, Google's goal is not to kill distributed email. The risk reward in terms of anti-trust simply isn't there. The value from the data they get from onboarding accounts is already superscalar since they only need one recipient from each message in order to get the data. Therefore its fair to call it Embrace/Extend if we squint a bit, but there's no Extinguish play for Gmail (just collateral damage of spam control).
The EEE strategy is still very much in play for certain companies, but not like this article describes.
If this article confuses people about what the term means, then it might be that much harder to for people to learn how to recognize the problem and distinguish it from other situations.
If we’re just talking about offering more to attract customers in a growth phase then locking them in with some kind of market dominance then I agree that is the VC playbook, but let’s not water down the meaning of EEE to refer to that. Walmart has been doing it for decades.