It's Philips - A goliath battle over DVD

The DVD Forum's spin doctors have found a way to deal with companies that want to break off from DVD-Ram standards and go their own way.

Undermining them in private is a possibility. Planting a couple of unattributable stories which cast doubt on the Sony-Philips breakaway is another. Or, meeting a journalist and spending 45 minutes slagging off Philips and Sony's DVD-R/W idea is another - and one which the DVD Forum has decided to exercise. It's all very un-Japanese.

Koji Hase, who is usually ultra-laconic as general manager of DVD at Toshiba and as the DVD Forum's head, said: 'I believe the way in which Sony and Philips are behaving is completely wrong.' But the time for ultra-laconicity has passed. Now is the time for super-unlaconicness and tough-talking (it's a literal translation from the Japanese, given to me by the DVD technical documentation department).

'Sony's product is a scientist's creation. It's vapourware. Have you seen a Philips product that's been successful in the past 20 years?' asks Hase. One standard is an industry. Two is a disaster. As long as we were on a united front, we were fine. But it will be like CD, with 28 formats and zero compatibility. Sony should be held responsible for the negative publicity it created. Hase railed, moments before his head exploded, showering me with smoking and twitching bits of brain.

As I tried rinsing the blood from the white shirt I usually reserve for the best standards wars, Philips senior media relations manager Marijke van Hooren came running in to advise me it wasn't a standards war after all, and was more like a discussion. It's just at this point that the discussion got a little bloody. Unfortunately, she slipped on an eyeball and banged her head on the floor, which accounts for the impressionistic logic of her view of the DVD-Ram standards war, er, I mean exchange of views which I've summarised thus: 'Although a possible replacement for the VCR, the tape drive and the CD-Rom, the 2.7Gb DVD-Ram is not yet a mature technology.'

So Sony and Philips decided to launch another immature technology that does exactly the same thing, is no better technically and is completely incompatible. Therefore - and this is the bit I don't get - it's not a standards war. I'm not making this up, except the head explosion, which actually occurred during the testing of a secret new Intel technology to apply the Pentium design to the human brain.

Before we get to DVD-Ram, DVD-R/W or some other standard, we can all look forward to DVD-Rom drives shipping in quantity in Europe - as long as we don't hold our breath. It's just that European DVD-Roms were supposed to use a different sound standard from the rest of the world, and the company whose job it was to provide those chips didn't deliver on time. But if the DVD Forum is frustrated that someone has held up its DVD-Roms, there's comfort that the company that didn't deliver on time has a familiar name.