Toshiba and The Big Mistake

In an interview with Microsoft, Reuters reports that there is no movement toward a change to a Blu-ray player for the Xbox 360. This is odd, as moving to a medium of higher density would make sense, with the titles expected soon to need more than the space of  one standard DVD.

will this one find its way to the Smithsonian?

In that same article the Microsoft person contacted stated that eventually there would be a move to Blu-ray, as that would be a natural move. How strange that Microsoft isn’t using its clout to keep HD DVD as the standard for Xbox. Perhaps Toshiba was not willing to pay enough tribute to the oracle at Redmond.

Toshiba has really made some big mistakes here, not the least of which is removing HD DVD from the market completely. As I had stated before, it is a format that had no serious flaws, it was simply the wrong horse to back. The total cost to Toshiba for this mistake is estimated to be around 1 billion dollars. Toshiba is a huge conglomerate, but a billion dollar mistake is not pocket change to any non-government entity.

With at least one studio supporter of HD DVD, and a few hundred thousand drives sold as backup and distribution possibilities, HD DVD could have lived a normal, albeit compacted life span. As a backup medium, it might actually have had a very long life - the drives being less expensive to produce, and the small number of discs needed to do a backup of large hard drives would have been spectacular reasons for this usage.

can’t you imagine a single disc holding 15GB as backup, that costs under $120?

One thing that no one is willing to divulge is if anyone is going to release the post-mortem on HD DVD. Was its demise simply a matter of timing? Did the big push in the last three months of 2007 help or simply delay the inevitable? Many times a push such as the one noted gets so many units in the hands of the public that ‘critical mass’ is achieved, and the technology takes hold. On the other hand, the extreme price cuts may have convinced the movie studios that margin could never be restored, and HD DVD would remain a loss leader.

Toshiba has chosen to eat the loss, but it really should shop the technology around a bit, before destroying the assembly lines. After all, anyone who has read about, or remembers the Edsel  knows that it too, was a product that was basically good yet failed to impress the public.

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[tags] Toshiba, HD DVD, Microsoft, Xbox 360 [/tags]