With so much of your entertainment digitized, did you notice there was a war over your DVD collection?

Once upon a time when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, the battle was VHS vs. Betamax. Beta was better quality; VHS won.

Recently, a similar fight was had between the next version of DVD. Would it be HD DVD or Blu-ray. Microsoft was backing HD DVD, so you just know that the megacorporation won, right?

Eh, not so much.

Blu-ray has unequivocally won the high-definition video format war, and Microsoft has been surprisingly sanguine. They’ve canceled production of its HD DVD drive for the Xbox 360 and announced that they will support the Blu-ray format going forward.

Out with a whimper, and a tip of the hat.

“I think the world moves on,” said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer at the Mix ‘08 conference in Las Vegas.

And so it does.

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You know, it was bound to happen, wasn’t it?  Just like people figure out ways to spam Bluetooth, send annoying ads to your mobile phone and break HD-DVD copy protection, it was bound to happen that someone, somewhere would copy the iPhone somehow.

That somehow has been done, in China.  I guess it’s being called the iClone, but some people are going as far as to say the Chinese pirated MiniOne is even better than the iPhone it’s pretending to be.  Wow.   According to the article I just read:

“The miniOne looked just like Apple’s iPhone, down to the slick no-button interface. But it was more. It ran popular mobile software that the iPhone wouldn’t. It worked with nearly every worldwide cellphone carrier, not just AT&T, and not only in the U.S. It promised to cost half as much as the iPhone and be available to 10 times as many consumers.” 

The question raised, that I must say I want answered as well, is this:  Does this signal the start of something bigger in China?  I am truly curious what other products they can copy/improve upon/relaunch out into the world.  Are we going to be stuck in an “anything you can do I can do better,” world?  If so, how will that affect products and their availability to us?  Interesting, very interesting.

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