What Toshiba has done right

1. The software was ready out of the gate

2. Good discs seem to extract every last bit of performance for the storage limitation. Example:The Prestige looks as good on an HD30 as it does a BD50.

3. Making Dolby TrueHD mandatory in hardware

4. Very consistent in releasing new firmware, addressing both fixes and new features

5. The second gen hardware is solid

6. Lack of region coding, so those titles that are Blu Ray-only in North America, but are available on HD DVD in Europe or Asia, will play just fine on your player.

7. Spearheaded hardware sales by selling at a loss early to get players out there

What Sony has done right

1. PS3. Even though it's a third place game machine in a market with only three competitors, without the PS3 Blu Ray would be still born

2. More disc space and higher bandwidth

3. Inclusion of PCM tracks

4. Done a much better job of capturing public mindshare

What Toshiba has done wrong

1. First gen hardware big, slow and glitchy

2. Not gotten other CE companies to produce hardware

3. Not selling their format hard enough to the public or the studios

What Sony has done wrong

1. Released a platform that just was not ready. At launch and for a few months thereafter, Sony couldn't even produce a dual layer Blu Ray disc. Single layer Blu Ray discs have less storage capacity than a dual layer HD DVD, and are further crippled by the inclusion of uncompressed multi channel audio tracks. Also, current players, the PS3 excluded, will not be able to utilize the interactive features that Blu Ray is going to offer whenever they finalize BD-J. Shame on you Sony! Unforgivable.

2. See "What Sony has done right" entry #1. The PS3 is tanking as a game machine. If they hadn't miscalculated how much people were willing to pay for a game console, we wouldn't be having this conversation because there would be so many PS3's out there HD DVD would have been crushed. They let that get away from them, and now it's anyone's guess how long before, or if ever, HD DVD goes away

3. See "What Sony has done right" entry #3. Why waste disc space on PCM when you can use TrueHD? In the beginning you had BD25, mpeg2 and PCM. No thanks

4. Not gotten their top tier studios to release any movies

We are dead in the middle of the format war, regardless how many misinformed articles or biased forum posts you read. Studio decisions and release schedules during the next 12 months should tell whether one of these formats will be able to achieve dominance over the other, or whether both are destined to remain niche formats. Sony and their constituents would have you believe that their 60% market share means it's over. However, Sony's own numbers have them with a 10 to 1 installed hardware advantage (that includes the PS3, if you disallow it, Toshiba has about a 3.5 to 1 installed stand alone player advantage). Toshiba holding 40% software sales in the face of such an overwhelming disadvantage in installed hardware means this isn't going to be decided for a while yet.