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The death of HD DVD is largely Toshiba's loss, but where does Microsoft fit in? Having released an external HD DVD drive for its Xbox 360 console, Microsoft seemed to be significantly backing Toshiba's format. However, did Microsoft ever have long term ambitions for the next generation format?
Hmmmmmm interesting.
Is this going to turn out like in the movies, where a few decades from now, everything is branded, owned and distributed by micropoop?
I have it on good authority that Microsoft has developed a few prototype Xbox 360 models, one of which is Blu-ray compatible. :secret:
I can't believe Microsoft would sink 2.6 million lines of code into its HD-DVD decoder, have the most spec-compliant decoder on the market, and maintain a team just for HD-DVD on the 360 if they weren't committed. They could have got away with licensing a basic codebase from Toshiba if all they wanted to do was pay lip service to it.
See Andy Pennell's blog on MSDN for details of just how much work went into Microsoft's HD-DVD support.
At the end of the day MS would of preferred HDDVD to win but it's not a great loss to them that it didn't. I'm sure they only backed it because of the fact Sony were invested in Blu-ray.
They probably care, but they do have the business sense of calling it quit instead of than sinking even more resource into it.