John C. Dvorak has a very interesting view on the situation, thinking Microsoft was pulling strings the whole time to mess with Sony. A convincing arguement, but unfortunately, just a bit of a conspiracy theory.
You know, I first heard this theory when Michael Bay went on rant. At the tiem I thought it might just be Bay but seeing another person bring it up make me wonder.
It isn't as if Microsoft hasn't pulled a few other unfriendly business tricks in their day, some of which led to litigation.
The only thing that keeps me from buying into it is that digital delivery in high-def is too far off to risk the blowback from investors. It isn't like you can hold a shareholders meeting and tell them of your nefarious plan that will cost millions (billions?) but have a huge payoff in a decade or more.
If this came happened at a time when more people had extremely high capacity broadband then maybe, but I still know people with dial-up. My current broadband can only stream standard def if no other online stuff is being done and there isn't a slowdown on my cable company's end.
If this were the case Microsoft would have been better off just spending the money on payoffs to movie companies to only support their standard def delivery service with high def delivery as a premium service. If the stories of cash bonuses to studios are true then that would have been teh cheaper route to go.
I think Microsoft honestly hoped to have a succesful format until high-def delivery could fully take hold.
I can't say why BD won out over HD-DVD, but my best guess is that enough people with PS3s and HDTVs went ahead and started buying them. It just seems like Sony's gamble paid off more than Microsoft's. Perhaps if Microsoft had been a part of development it would have gone the other way.
Personally, I think Toshiba is the only one that went in with a safe angle. Support cell chip technology while pushing your disc format the other direction. If Blu-Ray wins they get an increase in the Cell business, if HD-DVD wins they get an increase in their disc format business. Now they have all the Cell production stuff from Sony. Quite a coincedence how they jumped on thet only a few months before HD-DVD fell through.
Now, that might be a more interesting conspiracy. Did Sony give Toshiba the Cell stuff to speed the HD-DVD demise that was becoming more obvious?
