From LQWiki

"Embrace, Extend and Extinguish" (also known as "Embrace, extend, and exterminate")

This is the name given, by the US Department of Justice, to a business strategy of entering a marketplace using a defined set of standards or rules, adding proprietary extensions to those pre-defined standards, then using this difference to leverage other competitors out of the marketplace.

The alleged strategy's three phases are:

1. Embrace: Development of software substantially compatible with a competing product, or implementing a public standard.
2. Extend: Addition and promotion of features not supported by the competing product or part of the standard, creating interoperability problems for customers who try to remain neutral.
3. Extinguish: When extensions become a de facto standard because of their dominant market share, they marginalize competitors that do not or cannot support the companies extensions and create an obstacle to new competitors.

The goal of the strategy is to monopolise a product category.

This phrase was first used in the 16th July 1996 edition of the New York Times, in an article titled: "Microsoft Trying to Dominate the Internet"

(This information taken from the Wikipedia article of the same name.)