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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