Ben Hobbs

So everyone's point of view is meaningless, because its not yours?

His opinion means more than your simply because he reviews games for a living, whilst you probably do not.

Get yourself a professional job in the game reviewing industry, get invited to be the first to review possibly the most anticipated game in the world, give it a 2.0 or whatever (subjectively) and then we might listen to what you have to say, whilst moaning about your subjectiveness.

Its incorrect to say that they have a long way to go to recoup their losses.

All the money spent initially on launching these products and services, isn't money just thrown down the drain. Most of it is research and development costs, the benefit of said research goes into the whole of Microsoft as a company, as does the brand building.

$4 billion isn't that much in the scheme of these things when you consider something like myspace or facebook are often values at more than triple that, I believe that the work Microsoft has put into building a home entertainment brand, live services and such is much more viable for long term profits than a website that will be long forgotten in 10 years or so.

Mr.E

Thats a pretty bad analogy, the VHS and DVD are two different technologies nearly 20 years apart and the really BIG difference is that all movies were available on both formats more or less.

I'd say paying off manufacturers not to release their movies on a direct competitors format is pretty poor play. This would have played out so differently without movie industry guys trying to play the technology game.

I'm pretty sure they've shot themselves in the foot again trying to play kingmaker, most people download HD off the net because of the HD 'War'. I doubt Blu Ray will see anywhere near as much uptake as DVD.

Doesn't make any sense.....

Samsung, LG, Philips, Pioneer and Sony etc... aren't competitors until their technology becomes the only one available? I think now you will see price collusion and those companies taking advantage of the fact that this is the only technology available?

They haven't exactly been racing each other to reduce price until now... I don't see a mad rush coming anytime soon.

So how come all this "COMPETITION" between vendors like Samsung, Sony, LG, Pioneer etc... hasn't driven down the cost of Blu-Ray players already then?

How does Regional encoding, extra DRM, unfinished specifications, no backwards compatability, poor menu systems and interactivity, higher prices yet with exactly the same video/sound quality benefit consumers exactly...

Its a strange day when people cheer the loss of a much cheaper, less copy protected and yet identical quality format for a more expensive, unfinished product simply because of some misguided brand loyalty programmed into them from advertising.

Honestly, I think I'll skip this generation of video if its all been decided by movie studios playing games. Surely they would be better sticking to making films than messing with technology issues.

Whats hard to understand, Vivendi is French, Vivendi own WoW, WoW is French, as in owned by a French company. So they have USA employees and divisions, still French I'm afraid.

With the dollar performing so badly, I wouldn't be surprised to see more US companies being bought up by the Europeans.

I wonder how many Americans even knew that WoW is French ?

Jeez..

"VAVE100 gives you the ability to control over 20 different entertainment devices from a distance of over 50 feet via IR"

In other words it works with Vista via Bluetooth for sideshow functionality, it can also control other components VIA IR (Infra-Red).

The PS3 is Bluetooth, no?

It doesn't, however Universal MCE means something entirely different. WHat might give it away are the huge Media Centre buttons and the sideshow part, Sideshow is part of Vista.