PriceSCAN Blog

First, Sony has admitted that its PlayStation 3, just launched last weekend in Japan, cannot play some games available for the PS and PS2, while others play with various glitches and bugs (this on top of supply problems – see "But If We Made Too Many PlayStations, They Wouldn't Be As Cool"). Apparently they've got a Japanese web page up to tell buyers which of their legacy games are to be consigned to the dustbin of PlayStation history.
Meanwhile, Microsoft revealed that the Zune doesn't work with Vista. Not that Redmond needs to make the Zune a more attractive value proposition ("Just 'Cause We're Monopolists Doesn't Mean We're Not "Street"...", "The Zune: Microsoft's Little Brown Lump Of DRM-Enforcing Digital Joy"). But having two new marquee products behaving like oil and water can't help the roll-out of either.
Now let's cut these two firms some slack - and I'm all about giving a break to corporate citizens with a history of hiding rootkits on CDs (Sony) or of running afoul of anti-trust laws (the other one). Sony says they'll try to put out fixes on some older games, though others will likely never work properly on the PS3. As for Gates & Co., Vista is still in beta and the company says they'll remedy the compatibility problem shortly.
As of this writing, consumers are reported to be lined up around the block to buy those PS3's that are made available. And Microsoft has the near-monopolist's edge in driving the Vista upgrade, Zune or, as may be the case for many users, no Zune.
To some extent, these kinds of issues are the price of innovation. The PS3, with its Cell processor and Blu-ray functionality, does represent genuine technological progress. Vista's millions of code lines constitute a programming effort of historical proportions (I'll leave the market to decide what the Zune represents). Asking for new tech to emerge without running into backward compatibility issues is not entirely realistic. So if you want to be in with the new, you probably will have to throw out some of the old. Or at least download a fair number of fixes.