Microsoft (MSFT) XBox To Be Damaged By Death Of HD DVD

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) backed the wrong horse in the fight for high definition DVD disks and players. Redmond sided with Toshiba and its HD DVD platform and shipped the Xbox 360 with playback capacity for that platform. Sony (NYSE: SNE) backed the Blu-ray format which runs on the PS3.

Now that Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT), Best Buy (NYSE: BBY), and NetFlix (NASDAQ: NFLX) have walked away from HD DVD, the technology is likely to be pulled from the market. According to Reuters "We do not believe the recent reports about HD DVD will have any material impact on the Xbox 360 platform or our position in the marketplace," the company said. The statement should inspire some confidence, it doesn’t.

The XBox 360 has just lost and edge to PS3 in a market where it cannot give up an inch.

Douglas A. McIntyre

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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