What about taking a hit of billions of dollars to ensure your format won? Dumping consoles onto the market at over a hundred dollars cheaper than they cost to manufacture? Noone is squeeky clean, especially not in the console business.

Specifically, Sony dumped TONS of PS3 onto the market at the start of 2008 for free in many cases, and enjoy some serious artificial boost to sales...what am I talking about...Buy ANY HDTV from ANY Manufacturer, and get a PS3 for free, and get 10 brd movies!  What was the business model invovled there...brute force implementation, and everyone of those free ps3 counted as SOLD ps3!  Once the deals expired, ps3 sales started to wane, and while MGS4 helped keep sales afloat a little more, it was not sustianable.   

That's been my general line of thinking for a few years now. MS was in the game primarily to hinder Blu-Ray while working with their own digital distribution models behind the scenes.

HD DVD never had much of a chance, given the industry wide support of Blu-Ray, and it wasn't until MS stepped into the fray on the side of Toshiba with iHD, VC-1, and other things that Warner and the like hopped on board. MS is the primary reason why HD DVD matured enough to become a full fledged format. Despite this, they never fully backed the format. They were just stringing Toshiba along, in my opinion.

I recall no such deals with any TVs other than Sony Bravias.

Also, most of these deals took place over the 2007 holiday season, and they were made in an attempt to bring a swift end to the format war.  The format war was over as of January 2008, when Warner went Blu-Ray exclusive.  Why would they use such deals to continue "flooding the market" over the first six months of 2008, when they were no longer needed?

I mean, are you really insinuating that the ps3's decent sales in early 2008 were primarily the result of HDTV/ps3 combos rather than the price cut to $399?  Really?

No if that was the case they would have had an HD-DVD drive in every 360 made, They only supported it to hinder BR so they had more time to push their download based services.  

I'm not talking about Sony hence have no reason to mention them - other than the overly silly reason to seem 'fair' when I don't need to.

I'm refering to a comment on MS pointing out they were clearly far from squeakly clean in their actions in this specific case.  The generic mention of how this is standard in corportate business not only covers Sony but others.

I don't believe in the approach that says if I'm speaking about MS specifically I have to mention Sony too, or I have to mention Nintendo.

Sure Sony have played plenty of 'angles' too - I have never heard of a major business who has not.  However, when responding to a comment clearly saying MS had no ulterior motive I can respond without having to say that Sony have also made decisions with ulterior motives.

i doubt it.

actually besides windows , office and maybe IE (later 2 forced to OS monopoly)... microsoft ventures haven't been successful being #1.

while i believe they were careful with their  support, they still support because they saw a opportunity to win.

Corporate competition in general is nothing like the combined nastyness of technology companies. Console companies can be considered near the top of that scale because they will go as far as harming their own interests in order to harm other companies and promote their own agenda. The whole console business is insipid, and I don;t believe anyone should mention one specifically as malicious without mentioning the other two to get the point across and maintain that they are all malicious.

HD-DVD was a dead bird the moment MS didnt include it as the standard drive on the 360. If they did it would be the dominant format right now. I dont think they wanted it to fail- optical discs are going to be around for a long long time; they just didnt commit enough to it.

I work for Oracle.  Trust me, I know how malicious technology companies can get.

I take you point, but I'm just going to have to agree to disagree.

Specifically I disagree with the apologist approach that's crept into open discource (which might be an age thing) where you have to take care to try and caveat everything you say.  In my opinion it's an unecessary form of political correctness.  I'm not going to point out something about MS, then provide three examples of Sony and Nintendo each so people's knickers don't get in a twist.

Instead, I'm going to hold out for people being mature and being able to extrapolate and understand without needing everything on a silver plate.  Mind you, I saw in another thread someone appear to claim that being able to spell correctly was becoming mostly redundant - so maybe the truth is more and more people are going to need everything on a silver plate and qualified for them so they don't actually have to put in any effort themselves.  I hope they were just joking about the spelling, though.

But I'm going to be old fashioned and speak only to the topic without bring in a bunch of apologist examples that I don't need to.

So there!