| Stockstar1138 said: "please bare in mind that they are a business, and the wholepoint of business is to beat your competition and force customers/consumers to use your products." Bingo, however thats not how MS operates. Just look at their hand in HD DVD. They didn't back HD DVD because they thought it was the best product and they wanted to compete with blu-ray and win. They backed HD DVD, because they knew if they didn't blu-ray would quickly win and become the next-gen media format and by backing HD DVD they had a chance to derail both formats, which hurts the consumers and adoption of next-gen media formats, but leads way to consumers adopting Downloads, which is what many have said they were trying to do in the first place. Look at them, today they are saying that discs will be old technology in 12-18 months. If thats the case then why did they heavily back a disc based format just 3 months if they beileved they were going to be dead in a year and a half. They suckered in 300k peoples hard earned cash with HD DVD so that they could have a chance at running everybodys money into the ground and hope that their crumby little 720p, low bit XBL downloads might take off and they could have a hand in people's living rooms (which leads to another point, they put out crap products). Thats evil and despicable in my mind. |
I think that's a bad example. HD DVD had a very real shot at winning. The war could have quickly swung the other way had Warner backed HD DVD exclusively despite Sony using it as a trojan horse in the PS3. If Microsoft was so hell bent on destroying Blu Ray, they could have. Their profits from other divisions could have handled selling several millions of units of HD DVD at $100 to flood the market with those players forcing support to go HD DVD (much the way the PS3 worked for Sony). They could have also taken the millions they lost on HD DVD and worked hard to revamp their download service which is supposed to beat Blu Ray anyway. Blu Ray would have been the defacto choice w/o HD DVD, however the war created much more hype in the HD market and forced Blu Ray to a mass market price much more quickly. Really, who would buy a $1,000 Blu Ray player even if it was the only way to get true HD.
