Vista to directly support HD DVD; Blu-ray to come from 3rd parties

We were pretty surprised last week when an unnamed Microsoft spokesperson declared that Windows Vista would include "a great HD DVD and Blu-ray DVD experience." The statement, after all, seemed inconsistent with Microsoft's previous position that the company would directly support only HD DVD. Now it turns out that this is still the case. Microsoft Corporate VP Amir Majidimehr spoke to Chris Lanier, and confirmed that "Microsoft is hard at work in developing native HD DVD playback in Windows Vista ... as we have mentioned time and time again, Microsoft has no plans to provide native Blu-ray playback functionality in Windows Vista. Such functionality will be provided by third parties." We assume the spokesperson who said otherwise is relieved that we don't know his/her name.