We Win! 2.19.2008 10:54pm

The war is over. The war is over! We WIN! WE WIN!!

Today Toshiba announced that it will no longer manufacture HDDVD players. That's right. And they plan to be totally out of the game by March. This was not a unforeseen move, what with the HDDVD camp canceling their keynote at CES this year and Warner Brothers swinging into the BluRay camp.

This is good news for Sony though. For the first time their proprietary format actually caught on. BetaMAX, MiniDisc, LaserDisc, and UMD will not have another joining at their table of failure, not just yet. BluRay, is actually going to catch on.

And while Sony might be breathing easier that they didn't go 0 for 5, the real winner of this war is you. The consumer wins when there is only one format. I was never an anyone's side but the consumers for this battle of epic proportions. I'm glad one side finally realized there was no coming out of this alive and put down their arms and started waving a white flag. It really wouldn't have mattered to me which side it was, just as long as there was only one. Trying to sell 90% of this country on another disc format is going to be tough enough, telling them that there is two... well that's just annoying.

But here we have it. HDDVD is dead. Toshiba is backing down. And the consumers won.

[Permalink]