I have been under the weather this week, but I wanted to write a quick post about some interesting items. So let’s dig in.

Toshiba has given in and stopped trying to compete against Sony’s Blu-ray system in the high definition DVD market. Normally I think that competition is good for the consumer, but in this instance we might see a price drop in the HD DVD world. I would hope that more products will hit the home front soon now that the smaller manufacturers are not still playing both sides of the fence.

Wal-mart deciding to stop carrying the Toshiba HD DVD titles and players last week had something to do with it I would imagine. That and the fact that over this past holiday season a lot of consumers picked up the movies they wanted in Blu-ray. Factor in the fact that the Sony Playstation 3 has a built-in Blu-ray player and maybe you can start to see where this market was headed, maybe even before Toshiba saw it.

Another front where the consumer may benefit from someone throwing in the towel is the Micrsoft bid for Yahoo. By the way, when Microsoft originally offered the takeover letter the offer was valued at around $44 billion, but do to Microsoft sock slippage, the offer is now around $41 billion. Ouch.

Where I think the consumer might end up coming out in the black on this one is this: Yahoo offers a lot of real talent to the Microsoft stable, while I fervently hope that the Redmond management team won’t just squash the dot com feeling that Yahoo could gain once again.  Admittedly Yahoo lost is sense of cool some time ago, but perhaps these two can really help each other, and that is a good thing for both of them.   I do not want to see a world where Google is the only search engine, nor do I want to Microsoft obliterate Yahoo, but somewhere in the middle would be welcomed.  At least until the next garage start-up shows up and changes how we think about the net.

Matt