CurtPalme.com Home Theater Forum

**kal**

This is a really interesting article. Not sure how much of it is true (there's some speculation) but it's a really interesting read nonetheless:

http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2008/02/21/lessons-from-the-death-of-hd-dvd/

I'll have to keep my eyes on this website/blog from now on.

Kal

**AnalogRocks** · Posted: Fri Feb 22, 2008 2:45 am Post subject:

Good read Kal!

JustGreg · Joined: 07 Mar 2006 Posts: 3098 Location: Kenosha, WI

Hmmmm....I seem to remember somebody in another thread ranting about M$ hanging Tosh out to dry. Now whoooo was that?...Oh yeah...it was ME! Twisted Evil

Good read. They were much more eloquent than I. Laughing

fireanimal · Joined: 17 Jul 2007 Posts: 231 Location: Stayner, ON

Is it just me, or does that guy hate Microsoft? There were some valid points, but this guy makes them out to be the devil.

**AnalogRocks** · Posted: Fri Feb 22, 2008 4:49 am Post subject:

jask · Joined: 17 Mar 2006 Posts: 10187 Location: kamloops BC

That was a great read!!

Quote....

When charged with the reality that Microsoft is nothing more than a marketing organization pushing inferior technology tied to proprietary standards that will later be leveraged to extort higher prices, the company responds with a smoke screen that declares that its products will be first-to-market and supported by lowballing Chinese manufacturers. At the same time however, Microsoft has only ever delivered late, inferior products that have a higher total cost of ownership. Its supporters have worked hard to bury this reality even as Microsoft continues to raise prices on poor products that have limited competition, such as Windows Vista.

NICE!!!

Very Happy

Elaine Benes · Joined: 25 Apr 2006 Posts: 1416

That article has changed my mind about the demise of HD DVD...

I've been loathe to support Blu Ray in any way because of Sony's involvement. However, if there is a company more evil than Sony, it is for sure, Microsoft...

WanMan · Joined: 19 Mar 2006 Posts: 10270

Everyone, you can blame Microsoft all you want, but let's keep things in perspective and accept the fact that most of you have been supporting them, either directly or indirectly, since their inception. If Microsoft were to disappear tomorrow with all of their products and services this planet would die.

Kind of hard to do the things that so many people are doing via Microsoft solutions--even if they were considered by some to be inferior. Also, let's not forget to blame all those Microsoft partners putting the M$ products on computers and into the hands of millions. No one else wanted to do it.

Before you hate Microsoft, hate yourselves for supporting them. Now, where's the evil smilie.

ecrabb · Posted: Fri Feb 22, 2008 2:35 pm Post subject:

That site specifically is a very pro-Apple site. Predictably then like most other pro-Apple sites, they're extremely anti-Microsoft and it shows in many of the stories they write. Another Apple/Mac news aggregation blog I read is MacDailyNews, and they're the same way. The entire Mac community really lined up behind Blu-ray simply because Microsoft was backing HD DVD. It was stupid, really.

Sony and Microsoft are both excellent examples of corporate hegemony. Sony not to the extent of Microsoft perhaps, but they certainly own some markets, too. In other ways, Sony is worse than Microsoft, but for different reasons. Personally, I'm disgusted by the fact that Sony owns interests in so many markets... content creation and distribution (movie studios and music labels), consumer electronics, computers, cellphones. They're one of the largest media conglomerates in the world. Then, add to the hegemony the fact that they LOVE DRM on the media side of the company. Rootkit, anyone? They also love proprietary sh*t just as much as Microsoft. The bottom line is I didn't see anything better about Sony than Microsoft. In short, same bull****, different companies.

But, at least I was able to judge each format on it's technical merit and chose HD DVD as the more consumer-friendly format for a variety of reasons. The Mac community (and Roughly Drafted blog) was incapable of the same objectivity. I say this as a member of the Mac community.

SC

**kal** · Posted: Fri Feb 22, 2008 2:57 pm Post subject:

aspec2 · Joined: 10 Apr 2006 Posts: 549

MS could not have done any of this without the incompetence of the competition.

I'm going to steal your new car.

O.K, it will be in the driveway with the doors open.

Walt

greg_mitch · Joined: 03 May 2006 Posts: 5320

They rip on the Zune like 20 times! I got my wife a 30gig for Xmas for $90 from Dell and she loves it.

Couldn't find a comparable player for cheaper. Don't know what is so bad about it?? It is even white so it can blend in with all the hippy ipoders.

MikeEby · Joined: 24 Jun 2007 Posts: 5237 Location: Osceola, Indiana

The article is interesting, some of the facts are not correct as far as I know. It stated that HD-DVD support was built into Vista. I don’t know what they mean by that, I cannot play HD-DVD’s without PowerDVD.

It also stated that Vista was a repackaged version of XP. There major differences “Under the Hood” between Vista & XP and the article failed to communicate this fact. It also stated that corporations were not embracing Vista, yes this is true but it was also true of Windows NT, Windows 2000 Pro and XP. Typically in the past, corporations wait 2-3 years before large scale rollout of a desktop OS usually through hardware attrition, this is nothing new. Full retail versions of Vista & XP are grossly overpriced but I have never known anyone purchase these over the OEM versions and upgraded are priced very comparable to OSX Upgrades.

While I am on the subject of OSX during the period XP was released in 2001 and Vista in 2007 Apple released 4 versions of OSX called Cheetah, Jaguar, Panther & Tiger, typically these upgraded have a street price of $100 each. You do the math and draw your own conclusions.

Mac mainstay applications like Photoshop CS3 require an OSX upgrade to Tiger to function so Apple and their 3rd party venders are not exactly innocent of requiring “forced upgraded”. The latest version of OSX 10.5 called Leopard released late last year does include some very nice features like "Time Machine" a very cool file archiving feature that if Microsoft were to included as an element in Windows it would be dismissed as “Bloatware” and 3rd party software vendors would probably take legal actions forcing them to remove it. One seeming odd feature in Leopard is called "Boot Camp" it allows users to boot to native XP or Vista session on Intel based systems, weird huh? If OSX was so great why do you need to run Windows?

Back on topic there were many reasons for the failure of HD-DVD marketing played a large role, simple things such as store displays at big box stores such as Best Buy: HD-DVD just did not have a presents in these locations. Lack of a game console with native support and not securing studios such as Disney most certainly didn’t help. In my case the overly priced combo packs were a total turnoff on HD-DVD some costing as much as $12 more per disk with no other non-combo option. Perhaps it will be a case study in college marketing with everything Toshiba did wrong, but I personally don’t think Microsoft had much of a role in its demise.

Mike

jask · Joined: 17 Mar 2006 Posts: 10187 Location: kamloops BC

WanMan · Joined: 19 Mar 2006 Posts: 10270

garyfritz · Joined: 08 Apr 2006 Posts: 12088 Location: Fort Collins, CO

No effin' way!! They could produce a false positive just as easily as producing nothing...

louthewiz · Joined: 30 Jan 2008 Posts: 10

It is a real shame that hd-dvd died so fast Crying or Very sad

, I really like my player and the picture is amazing.
Now that BD is the winner you can be sure that prices will stay high and their players have so many bugs to be ironed out
and that it will keep me away until the prices come down and media prices do the same. Thumbs Down

oliverg · Posted: Sun Feb 24, 2008 10:52 am Post subject:

There are quite a few misconceptions in that article - EG Vista is far from being a commercial failure.

Sales of Vista and Office 2007 (like them or hate them) have heavily bolstered Microsoft's profits so far this financial year.

There is a lot of truth splattered around in there but it looks to me that underlying all that, the author is guilty of spreading a whole bunch of anti Microsoft FUD.

garyfritz · Joined: 08 Apr 2006 Posts: 12088 Location: Fort Collins, CO

I've been involved with updates of Windows since the 3.1 days. There are always problems with new Microsoft releases, and there is always resistance to accepting the newest thing. I know quite a few people (myself included) who flatly refuse to install ANY 1.0 release of ANY Microsoft product, period. Past history shows that's a dangerous thing to do.

However I've never seen the amount of resistance from corporate customers that I'm seeing with Vista. Yes, there is some demand from large corporations; I spent October traveling around Asia doing training for a product release based on Vista. But overall there seems to be very little demand for Vista from large corporate buyers, and a fair amount of active resistance. And no wonder, in my opinion. Yes, Vista is a pig and runs about half as fast as XP with double the memory, but that's nothing new. Every new Microsloth OS is a bigger pig than the last, and they don't have decent performance until the end of the OS lifecycle when the hardware and RAM has had a chance to catch up. But in past major MS OS's there have been improvements that made it worth upgrading. In Vista about the only "improvement" is the security enhancements, and those generally cause more headaches than they prevent. The costs to upgrade to Vista can be staggering, because of the number of apps that don't work properly within the new Vista security model.

Sales of Vista bolstered MS's profits because it's about the only OS you can *buy* on a new box any more. Within a few months you won't be able to buy XP from Microsoft. I'm sure that will cause another uptick in MS's profits. That doesn't mean Vista is a good product or that people are buying it because they WANT to.