I live just miles from the Wal-Mart headquarters.  Half the people I know live and breathe Wal-Mart.  I sell software to the vendors that hawk their wares at Wally World.  So it’s not a surprise to me that Wal-Mart dealt the final destructive blow to HD-DVD and Toshiba.  Today Toshiba announced the disbandment of HD-DVD, marking a close to the format wars.

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL1627196120080216

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23186582/

An “I toldja so” may be in poor taste, but months ago I predicted how Wal-Mart’s BluRay section was a huge win for Sony and would eventually spell the death for HD-DVD.  (the blog post never got migrated from my old personal site)

The Reuters article above talks about hundreds of millions of dollars in losses.  With all my ties to Microsoft, I’m curious to know how this will impact them.  They had already talked about releasing compatibility with BluRay later this year, but from my understanding their investment with HD-DVD technology was extensive.  What kind of losses will it generate for them?

This just goes to show how impactful Wal-Mart can be on technology.