Blu-ray vs. HD DVD

Why is it that Sony always seems to lose out in these format wars? I remember in the Eighties, when my cousin Hoon convinced our other cousins to buy Betamax players. Lo and behold, the rest of the world chose VHS. I had a somewhat early Sony digital camera, which used Sony's Memory Stick for photo storage. I've since learned the error of my ways, and my family is now a Canon (Digital Elph) and Nikon (DSLR) family, happily reliant on SD Cards.

And now, the speculation is that Howard Stringer of Sony is ready to cave on the Blu-Ray format. Does this have anything to do with Walmart's decision to sell $100 HD DVD players on the Friday after Halloween?

Why is Sony always the kid who has to do things his own way, who can't play nice in the consumer electronics sandbox? When will they figure out that people aren't willing to live in a Sony-only world and won't put up with proprietary incompatible formats, even if they come embedded in XBox360's?

I've even neglected to mention the stupid UMD format that works in Sony's PSP game players. How many movies are they selling these days in the UMD format? Not many, I bet.

Sony, take a page out of Phillips' book and look at the success of the original Compact Disc, used even in your ubiquitous Discman players.