Format wars are commonplace in the modern history of electronics. Even Thomas Edison had to deal with political and corporate wrangling for the format of his early wax audio cylinder records invented in 1877.  The dispute over which audio recording format would become the standard continued until 1918 when Emile Berliner’s patent expired for his competing disc format.  Companies immediately put the far superior laterally cut discs into production and the format war was settled.  Most recently, Sony’s Blu-Ray disc beat out Toshiba’s HD-DVD after years of tussling for major movie studio support.  Some have argued that this format war [...]