There"s something disingenuous about the announcement this week from Microsoft Japan that it will make Longhorn, the company"s next major operating system release, compatible with the High Definition blue laser DVD from NEC and Toshiba, which is also backed by the DVD Forum. Since when was Longhorn written in Japan? And since when did an operating system company decide on support for a peripheral which will need its own dedicated drivers and which can be made almost plug compatible with the current DVD drives, as far as the operating system is concerned.
In our view it was a major non-announcement. The competing Blu-Ray specification is already streets ahead of the NEC Toshiba standard, and it has already established support from Hewlett-Packard and Dell, which is far more significant than Microsoft, since they are the customers here and they will actually buy the drives. Microsoft is hardly likely to turn around to its two biggest customers and tell them, no the operating system won"t recognize their DVD devices.