Quote:
Originally Posted by EatingPie
I'm going to go a little off topic here...
Where is the record of "paying off billions" to studios during the Blu-ray/HD-DVD format war? Nowhere, because they didn't.
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I am sorry, but you are misinformed. Warner made the switch to Blu-ray on the eve of the CES Show in Las Vegas and that ended HD DVD; Toshiba pulled out a couple of days after the show. There was definitely hundreds of millions of dollars on the table in various payments -- I'm not suggesting bribes, but rather business incentives in the coming year or so for co-sponsorship of advertising etc. I was there on the periphery of the inside action. Had Sony not stepped up in negotiations literally at the 11th hour with a deal that could not be refused, Toshiba would have won the day; in essence, Toshiba blinked.
As for ereaders, my point stands: the ereader division at one point had the serious ear of Sony senior management. Sony agreed to fund the development of the ereader; build plans for international launch; create an ereader store and develop the relationships to do that; and fund the business plan out two or three years at least -- you'd have to, in order to launch a new class of product. But whether through too rosy sales projections, or simply execution which was inadequate, the team ran out of steam and corporate largesse. Not willing to kill it outright, Sony management feigned deafness and the product withered. I can't prove this, but that's exactly how it appears to someone who knows how corporations work from the inside looking at Sony's ereader execution from the outside.