Will The Next XBox Use CARTRIDGES??

You may recall that I've been in favor of such a thing since last year; so obviously I'd support the HELL out of any company that actually tried what MCV claims Microsoft might by trying with the next XBox: Ditching disc-based games entirely in favor of "solid state" storage - aka the return of games on cartridges (or, more specifically, some kind of proprietary SD Card-esque format.) Wouldn't that be something.

It almost sounds crazy, but consider the difficult situation for Microsoft otherwise: Downloadable and/or "cloud" gaming is the wave of the future to a large degree (and whatever else the "NextBox" is, you can bet it'll be optimized for that), but physical media isn't going all the way away anytime soon; and the physical-media of choice for the forseeable future is Blu-Ray... a format owned by their competition, Sony. Given that, it's understandable how MS could at least be considering a potentially risky move like this.

What I want to know is, IF this goes down... do the others follow suit?

Sony, certainly, is unlikely to abandon Blu-Ray outright for the innevitable PS4... but if solid-state "carts" looked poised to catch on as a legit alternative (obvious benefits: low-to-no loading times, durability, on-board saving/writability) would it be that hard to "add a slot" to the machine just in case?

Similarly, though the WiiU is already in-production with a scheduled release of later this year, I could easily imagine otherwise-cautious Nintendo jumping on this theoretical bandwagon - if there's any game company bound to become almost sexually-aroused as the prospect of returning to proprietary cartridges it's Nintendo, after all...