By Richard Fisher
Editor Shane Sturgeon
Originally authored January 2008, final edit April 2008
There has been much said about the format war prior, during and after Blu-ray
HD DVD: Past, Present and a 1 Billion Future
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HD Library
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randybot
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Format War
Richard,
Thank you for the best article that I have ever seen explaining the full scope of the format war.
Thank you for the best article that I have ever seen explaining the full scope of the format war.
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jerfilm
- Major Contributor
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- Joined: Fri Oct 29, 2004 12:46 pm
Yes, thanks. It's a nasty world out there and the article certainly suggests that neither Sony nor Toshiba were the good guys.
I spent 40 years running a small property and casualty insurance company and I remember well going to Trade Association meetings and having the group informally agree to a certain course of action. Only to wake up a week later to discover that most parties had gone home and done as they damn pleased. And yet, we continued the pretense of being a cooperative "association". Actually, most of the players were there, I suspect, to try to find out as much as they could about what their competitors were thinking and planning while at the same time, trying not to give away anything about their own plans. If nothing else, it was always an interesting thing to watch.
And generally, the consumer is the loser. We give a lot of lip service to the concept of "letting the market" or the consumer decide. Bull. We're kidding ourselves - the decisions are ultimately made by those who have the biggest vested interest in the outcome. And in this case, even though a million of us had a vested interest in HD-DVD and had probably spent, what, $300-400 million dollars on equipment and software, in the final analysis, it was a drop in the bucket and nobody except us gave a damn......
That's the way it works. Lesson never learned: Don't be an early adaptor.
Jerry
I spent 40 years running a small property and casualty insurance company and I remember well going to Trade Association meetings and having the group informally agree to a certain course of action. Only to wake up a week later to discover that most parties had gone home and done as they damn pleased. And yet, we continued the pretense of being a cooperative "association". Actually, most of the players were there, I suspect, to try to find out as much as they could about what their competitors were thinking and planning while at the same time, trying not to give away anything about their own plans. If nothing else, it was always an interesting thing to watch.
And generally, the consumer is the loser. We give a lot of lip service to the concept of "letting the market" or the consumer decide. Bull. We're kidding ourselves - the decisions are ultimately made by those who have the biggest vested interest in the outcome. And in this case, even though a million of us had a vested interest in HD-DVD and had probably spent, what, $300-400 million dollars on equipment and software, in the final analysis, it was a drop in the bucket and nobody except us gave a damn......
That's the way it works. Lesson never learned: Don't be an early adaptor.
Jerry