Ouch Microsoft was hit by a big $1.5 billion judgment for its use of MP3 related patent technology Windows. People in the UK are angry that Microsoft Vista is a lot more expensive there than in the US. European PS3's will not have as good backwards comparability as US or Japanese models.

Software will take over some of the functionality that was originally taken care of by dedicated chips, which means far fewer PlayStation 2 games can be played on a European PS3 compared with the Japanese and American PS3 models that play 98 percent of old games.