Sony makes some historic blunders. One of the biggest was making digital music players that wouldn't play MP3s , the most popular digital music format. Those devices played Sony's own ATRAC format, which the company killed a few months ago. Sony hasn't learned from its mistakes. Consider the PlayStation 3 , the too-expensive game console that hasn't become the hit the company wanted. Sony's finally selling a cheaper PS3 in the U.S., just in time for the holidays. It'll cost $400, but will have only 40 gigabytes of storage -- half that of the standard version, which is getting a price cut to $500 from $600. That's fine. Some people don't need more than 40 gigs anyway in a video game system. But get this: the cheap PS3 won't play games made for the PlayStation 2 . That feature is called backward compatibility, and it's a dealbreaker. A typical PlayStation 2 owner probably has a nice library of video games. The new PS3 won't play any of them. It's not that Sony doesn't know how to add backward...
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