SONY Looking at Repeat of BetaMax.VHS Battle?

With content owners/studios lining up behind competing HD DVD formats, is SONY's Blu-Ray format going to be too late to the retail marketplace? If Toshiba is right and it can make the standard by getting out there first, will SONY be able to still find its share either in retail, or like BetaMax, in pre-production. With a technology that is targeted at producing DVD's for sale, I don't know enough about how the varying technologies work to even guess, but with the problems SONY is having in other business sectors, this can't be good news..