That’s all, folks. As more and more companies have either marginalized or dropped Toshiba’s HD DVD player, we and the rest of the world called for Toshiba to admit defeat and let it die — but the company bravely marched on. Until now.
Toshiba Corp. President Atsutoshi Nishida announced that Toshiba would be officially dropping the format — crowning the Blu-Ray king of High-Definition Video. How did Nishida make the announcement? Like every good Japanese male — proudly and with much honor.
"We concluded that a swift decision would be best," Nishida said, admitting that he knew the company was beaten when most of Hollywood went to the Blu-ray format, citing Warner Bros. switch as the definitive blow.
"If we had continued," said Nishida, "that would have created problems for consumers, and we simply had no chance to win." HD DVD has an estimated 1 million customers — 600,000 of which are in North America. Nishida promised that Toshiba would continue providing product support for the technology — but we wonder, really, for how long. How much money does the company really want to spent on supporting a dead format? We give it six months, maybe a year, before the HD DVD buyers are out of luck.
It’s still not clear how the companies that did decide to go with the HD DVD format will proceed. Microsoft, Intel and NEC are among the big players, with Microsoft selling over 300,000 separate HD DVD drives for its Xbox 360 game console.
Yes, the defeat is more or less embarrassing for Toshiba — but, according to Goldman Sachs, the company should improve its profitability between $370 million to $460 million a year simply by pulling out. Hell, for that kind of money, we’d drop a dying format too.
Aside from his Samurai-like honorable withdrawal, Nishida also said that the company will spend more than $15.7 billion on two plants in Japan to create NAND flash memory which are sophisticated chips which would be used in portable music players and cell phones.
In response to the announcement, Sony, the creator of Blu-Ray, simply said, "Yippee."
