Arno# - The cutting edge of developer waffle

Bill Gates, at his final CES 2008 keynote speech, showed the world that when you are the richest man in the world, not only can you take the mickey out of yourself, you can rope the likes of Bono, Steven Spielberg, George Clooney and Al Gore into helping you. The spoof movie of Bill’s last day at Microsoft is buried inside a glitzy and tedious hour long keynote. Luckily a decent soul, Long Zheng over at istartedsomething, has taken the full keynote, chopped the drudge out and left just the spoof behind for all of us to enjoy. Click on the flash below to see it, or head over to istartedsomething for the full size version.

There seems to be a thing with “format wars”, that the weaker of the two always seems to win out. Examples are PCs with DOS/ Windows beating all other computer/OS combos in the 90s, IE beating Netscape and VHS beating Betamax. However it looks like the latest battle of the formats, between HD DVD and Blu-ray, may go the other way. Last Friday Warner Brothers announced that it was to start distributing films solely on Blu-ray as of May this year. Whilst the geek blog reaction was inevitable, even the Financial Times is today reporting that this could be the tipping point that signals the end of HD DVD.

What the conspiracy theorists will make of this is unclear. A popular conspiracy theory has Microsoft using its financial weight behind the scenes to drag out the battle between the to disc formats in a hope that more people will opt for internet-download scheme for films next time around (with Microsoft controlling the download format of course). So watch out for a swing back in HD DVD’s favour in the next couple of months if this really is the case…