...The Idiot Generals Start Speaking... Microsoft Xbox UK boss Neil Thompson and Europe boss Chris Lewis came out swinging in an interview. They blamed Sony for "forcing" Blu-Ray onto consumers and tried really hard to make Sony look bad: From a movie playback point of view. "Sony are now making people pay an extra few hundred pounds for a Blu-Ray DVD drive which we don't know is going to be the standard in the next-generation DVD formats. This is the company that brought out Betamax – we don't quite know where they're going to go with this," says Thompson. Is this guy blind or shortsighted? Microsoft put a cheap DVD drive into the Xbox 360. Sure, that's good for gamers because it lowers the cost of an already expensive machine. Microsoft is coming out with a HD-DVD add-on for watching movies only. But, do I really care about any next-gen console playing movies? No. Consoles playing movies has always been a suck-ass affair. The built-in players lack features and often don't play movies as well as stand-alone video units. So, having a add-on HD-DVD drive or a Blu-Ray drive for movie playback? Doesn't matter for me. I'll end up with a high-end stand-alone unit anyways. What does matter is that Microsoft's cheap DVD drive only offers developers and publishers 8.5GB per disk. Sony's inclusion of the Blu-Ray drive allows for developers and publishers to get 25GB on a single-layer disc or 50GB on a dual-layer disc. Who the hell cares about the movie playback aspect when the games can have: Higher quality sound, higher resolution textures, higher polygon count models, and better in-game movies? Hey, Neil Thompson: Are you seeing where Sony is going with the Blu-Ray drive yet? Wake up.