According to Toshiba senior vice president, Hisatsugu Nonaka, from 2008 every Toshiba laptop will sport a HD DVD drive as standard. Talk about setting the cat among the pigeons. This is a bold statement and a bold move.
Some of you might think: "Big deal, it’s just one laptop vendor" and that’s true, but then you have to look at the numbers. IDC estimated that Toshiba sold 9.2 million laptops in 2006. Assuming Toshiba sales increase even slightly, then there’s going to be the possibility of 10 million HD DVD players out there by the end of 2008, or sometime in the early part 2009. If you consider that Acer also offers some HD DVD-enabled notebooks – and could easily do something like Toshiba if the price was right – HD DVD is not just suddenly back in the game but also, leading the charge.
Of course, there is a caveat to all of this. One of the reasons that the PS3 is not selling as fast as Sony wants, or needs, is because of that high price tag, courtesy of that Blu-ray drive. If Toshiba wants to make HD DVD the standard, it’s going to have to do it by controlling the cost of adding a HD DVD drive to its laptops. It will probably mean sucking up a loss just to flood the market.
hyeah: