Corvillus

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

Sound like Microsoft to you? Well, this time it’s not Microsoft that’s using this strategy, it’s News Corp, with their social networking site MySpace. After the recent addition of MySpace Video, now MySpace has added new functionality to their site that is broken in Flash 8, which requires the beta version of Flash 9 to work properly. The catch? MySpace has also adds the allowEmbedded=”internal” attribute to all of the object tags in their player which instantiate Flash widgets. The result, if the Flash widget links to any external content, like, say a video hosted on YouTube, for example, and the user is using Flash 9, the widget will not work. That’s anti-competitive behaviour if I’ve ever seen it (the “extinguish” part of the equation).

tiara.org » MySpace to Secondary Markets: Drop Dead