Don’t believe everything you read
Chris Lanier says “Windows Vista will support HD DVD playback on 32-bit machines.” He is contradicting a whole bunch of people who have been swarming over a controversial story since this afternoon.
Every once in a while I disagree with Chris on some issue. And every single time, I turn out to be wrong.
Y’all in the blogosphere might want to learn from my mistakes.
I’m not sure what Y’all in the blogosphere are supposed to learn in this case. Don’t believe when MS Senior Program Manager Steve Riley states publicly “Any next-generation high definition content will not play in x32 at all” because Media Companies insisted, so “we had to do this”?
Lanier isn’t contradicting the “blogosphere”, he’s contradicting Microsoft’s Steve Riley. APC, etc. reported on his coments. He may have mispoken, or been misquoted, but this isn’t the case of the “blogosphere” swarming over some rumour or hype. It was a very clear statement about 32 bit and HD. That seems to have been wrong.
Exactly Totoro. People are playing into Microsoft’s hands when they say ‘don’t believe everything you read.’
They should really have said: “don’t believe everything our spokesman says to a conference of 2,500 delegates and then reconfirms afterwards in a followup interview.”
As the journalist who wrote the original report on this, I can’t help feeling peeved that Microsoft’s ambiguous wording in its clarification makes it look like I misrepresented the facts in the news report. I didn’t! I reported exactly what the Microsoft USA Senior Program Manager for security, Steve Riley, said in his presentation.
Dan,
I never said or implied that your original reporting was wrong, and when I wrote this I had not read nor was I aware of Microsoft’s “clarification.” And by the way, I agree that it was bullshit on their part to use the passive voice in their statement and say “the information shared was incorrect.”
My point is that a lot of people – A LOT – picked up on your original story and passed it along without doing any additional reporting. When I read Chris’s remarks, my first reaction was, “Oh, this is interesting.” Which was why I passed this along.
Short summary: Your story accurately reported information that a Microsoft spokesman said. That information was apparently incorrect. The blogosphere echoes the original story. Original story turns out to be based on incorrect facts.
Congratulations on updating your original story prominently to include a link to Microsoft’s statement. Let’s see how long it takes for all those other blogs and news outlets to do the same.
Although after reading some of the corrections, it seems like the original statement is actually basically accurate. Riley said:
1. Vista 32 won’t play HD-DVD/Blu-Ray out of the box.
2. Because the studios deemed it unacceptable.
The “correction” is that other, hypothetical people could hypothetically make HD-DVD/Blu-Ray work on Vista 32, if they can persuade the studios that it’s acceptable. There’s no news of any actual Vista 32 HD-DVD/Blu-Ray player, and no real reason to believe the studios would change their mind, so essentially all Microsoft is saying is “We won’t stop other people from doing this, if they’re able to persuade the studios into allowing them.”