Is Sony going to win the next optical disk battle?

My son thinks so. He's only 15 and won't remember the betamax, vhs battle of the 70s which Sony lost because they tried to go proprietary, the public chose otherwise. The same can be said for the Sony MemoryStick, not having the same popularity of the compact flash (CF) and/or secure digital (SD) card. Apple despite having a strong foothold of the early PC market lost to the IBM clones that were cheaper and ultimately more powerful the Motorola based CPU. So why would it be different this time?

The key to his argument which I have to agree with is the PS3. With very little to choose between the Blu-ray and HD DVD technology (at least from a layman's perspective). Sony has shipped over a million PS3 units since its launch late 2006. What this means is that there are over 1 million blu-ray capable players out there, far exceeding the number of standalone HD DVD players that would be around 30% of market share. Is it enough to ensure blu-ray will prevail? Time will tell but maybe the PS3 will become their trojan horse in the consumer market.

Sidenote: thanks to human ingenuity in the form of Pat Glynn, my son has succeeded in using his sister's Wii bluetooth controller to play Half-life 2 on the PC. After watching him play ultra high resolution games on his PC and then PS/3 1080p HDTV, the Wii was less than impressive for me. However, my daughter thought differently, for her, it was interactive experience of waving the Wii remote around that had her engrossed for a couple of hours. It's not always about technology...