Strategic Responses to Standardization: Embrace, Extend or Extinguish?

Prior research on technology standardization has focused on two common patterns: processes in which product developers and other stakeholders cooperate to achieve a consensus outcome, and “standards wars” in which competing technologies vie for dominance in the market. This study examines Microsoft&...

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Main Authors: WOODARD, C. Jason, WEST, Joel
Format: text
Language:English
Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2011
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Online Access:https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/3144
https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/4144/viewcontent/WoodardWest2011_WP.pdf
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spelling sg-smu-ink.sis_research-41442022-03-28T07:23:20Z Strategic Responses to Standardization: Embrace, Extend or Extinguish? WOODARD, C. Jason WEST, Joel Prior research on technology standardization has focused on two common patterns: processes in which product developers and other stakeholders cooperate to achieve a consensus outcome, and “standards wars” in which competing technologies vie for dominance in the market. This study examines Microsoft's responses to 12 software technologies in the period between 1990 and 2005. Despite the company's reputed tendency to pursue a strategy dubbed “embrace, extend, and extinguish,” a content analysis of news articles from the same period reveals surprising diversity in Microsoft's responses at the product level. We classify these responses using a typology that treats “embrace” and “extend” as orthogonal decisions faced by product development organizations. This typology allows four kinds of outcomes to be distinguished, including two kinds of partial compatibility in addition to the familiar cases of full compatibility and incompatibility. To complement this cross-sectional perspective, we examine more closely the evolution of Microsoft's strategy with respect to Sun's Java technology. This longitudinal view highlights another underappreciated aspect of standardization, namely the extent to which a firm's strategic posture toward a standard can change over time, even within the same product family. Based on this evidence, we suggest that firms tend to publicly embrace a standard with the aim of gaining legitimacy with a community of adopters, whereas efforts to extend a standard tend to be motivated by the intent to leverage the underlying technology to achieve or strengthen architectural control. We argue that legitimacy and leverage are strategic complements, making the “embrace and extend” strategy attractive to firms like Microsoft, but that the resulting outcome is unstable. Firms that pursue this strategy ultimately face a choice between contributing their extensions back to the standard and losing proprietary leverage, or giving up the legitimacy associated with standards compliance in exchange for freedom from the constraints of compatibility. 2011-10-01T07:00:00Z text application/pdf https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/3144 info:doi/10.1108/S0742-3322(2011)0000028014 https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/4144/viewcontent/WoodardWest2011_WP.pdf http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems eng Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University Computer Sciences Strategic Management Policy Technology and Innovation
institution Singapore Management University
building SMU Libraries
continent Asia
country Singapore
Singapore
content_provider SMU Libraries
collection InK@SMU
language English
topic Computer Sciences
Strategic Management Policy
Technology and Innovation
spellingShingle Computer Sciences
Strategic Management Policy
Technology and Innovation
WOODARD, C. Jason
WEST, Joel
Strategic Responses to Standardization: Embrace, Extend or Extinguish?
description Prior research on technology standardization has focused on two common patterns: processes in which product developers and other stakeholders cooperate to achieve a consensus outcome, and “standards wars” in which competing technologies vie for dominance in the market. This study examines Microsoft's responses to 12 software technologies in the period between 1990 and 2005. Despite the company's reputed tendency to pursue a strategy dubbed “embrace, extend, and extinguish,” a content analysis of news articles from the same period reveals surprising diversity in Microsoft's responses at the product level. We classify these responses using a typology that treats “embrace” and “extend” as orthogonal decisions faced by product development organizations. This typology allows four kinds of outcomes to be distinguished, including two kinds of partial compatibility in addition to the familiar cases of full compatibility and incompatibility. To complement this cross-sectional perspective, we examine more closely the evolution of Microsoft's strategy with respect to Sun's Java technology. This longitudinal view highlights another underappreciated aspect of standardization, namely the extent to which a firm's strategic posture toward a standard can change over time, even within the same product family. Based on this evidence, we suggest that firms tend to publicly embrace a standard with the aim of gaining legitimacy with a community of adopters, whereas efforts to extend a standard tend to be motivated by the intent to leverage the underlying technology to achieve or strengthen architectural control. We argue that legitimacy and leverage are strategic complements, making the “embrace and extend” strategy attractive to firms like Microsoft, but that the resulting outcome is unstable. Firms that pursue this strategy ultimately face a choice between contributing their extensions back to the standard and losing proprietary leverage, or giving up the legitimacy associated with standards compliance in exchange for freedom from the constraints of compatibility.
format text
author WOODARD, C. Jason
WEST, Joel
author_facet WOODARD, C. Jason
WEST, Joel
author_sort WOODARD, C. Jason
title Strategic Responses to Standardization: Embrace, Extend or Extinguish?
title_short Strategic Responses to Standardization: Embrace, Extend or Extinguish?
title_full Strategic Responses to Standardization: Embrace, Extend or Extinguish?
title_fullStr Strategic Responses to Standardization: Embrace, Extend or Extinguish?
title_full_unstemmed Strategic Responses to Standardization: Embrace, Extend or Extinguish?
title_sort strategic responses to standardization: embrace, extend or extinguish?
publisher Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University
publishDate 2011
url https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/3144
https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/4144/viewcontent/WoodardWest2011_WP.pdf
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