I love this kind of strategic question! Sony really wants the Blu-Ray HD format for video to be successful. It lost the Betamax race. It is supposed to be the ultimate leader in consumer electronics. It is betting heavily on Blu-Ray, heavily enough to have made it part of the proposition for its market-leading videogame console, the Playstation 3.

But a key pattern in the early adoption of new video formats is which format pornography tends to favor. So what’s a market leading, gigantic consumer electronics company to do? Sony decided to discourage pornographers from creating Blu-Ray based DVDs. It did the same thing when it was promoting the Betamax format; now people say that was a critical error. (That sounds like revisionist history to me, but I don’t remember exactly what killed Betamax: maybe the refusal to license; maybe the shorter storage times; maybe no porn; maybe all of the above.)

Sony did embed it in their videogame console; Can you imagine the reaction of parents if they saw the leading proponent of Blu-Ray endorse the idea that porn could be easily viewed with the PS3? Greedy self interest versus the “public good” and family values. What would you do?

Sir Howard Stringer, CEO of Sony Corp. and a long time media executive known for his acerbic wit and impolitic tongue, had to decide: The company has formally instructed its reproduction subsidiary not to produce Blu-Ray discs with pornographic content.

I went to BestBuy on Thursday (January 25) to see about buying a new house computer (the one in the kitchen nobody owns but everybody uses). There were two computers on display; that’s right, two. BestBuy usually (in my personal experience) has around 30-50 computers on display, between all the notebook and desktop models from the 7-8 brands they carry. On Thursday, the shelves were empty except for a couple of computers running Vista in demo mode. But those computers didn’t have pricing.

I discovered that those computers didn’t have pricing because Microsoft decreed that Vista wouldn’t be for sale until the following Tuesday. Now, isn’t that just the most interesting thing you can imagine. I wanted to buy a computer and was ready to walk out of the door with one. But I wasn’t able to buy one and BestBuy wasn’t able to sell me one.

Going forward, I will only be able to buy computers running Microsoft Vista. As far as I can tell, Windows XP has been removed from the market. Microsoft knows better. Too bad I wasn’t able to get the computer.