At the Mix08 event in Las Vegas, Microsoft VP Steve Ballmer announced that Microsoft will now support Blu-ray. Microsoft started off as a sole supporter of the HD DVD format, and even if this may sound like big news, it was kind of expected. Not supporting Blu-ray in Windows would be more or less completely idiotic from more or less any angle, but just because Microsoft supports the new optical format, that doesn’t mean that it will embrace it for all platforms; I.e. Xbox 360.
“We’ve already been working on, for example, in Windows, device driver support for Blu-ray drives and the like, and I think the world moves on. Toshiba has moved on. We’ve moved on, and we’ll support Blu-ray in ways that make sense.”
The question most people are asking themselves is what the “ways that make sense” part means and how Xbox 360 fits into this. According to previous stories, Sony supports Microsoft and has offered to help them make a Blu-ray player for the video game console. This was later denied by Microsoft, which claims it will now focus entirely on the games and that there are no plans introduce Blu-ray addon for Xbox 360.
