The value I see in Xbox:

1) Their vendor agreements re: distribution and sales for games.
2) The OEM hardware channel profits/relationship.

Frankly? I see 2 options.

AMD is doing great. They're the only big players in the market I can see that understands how to grow a business instead of simply loot it. Xbox would potentially give AMD a big market leg up in their other product lines (namely, low power CPU/GPU). Xbox itself has always heavily depended on AMD hardware integration to run well. AMD excels at buying things and making them feed their entire pipeline - and that model works extremely well for Xbox.

It would just depend on what kind of deal they could get on the company, and Windows use (if they'd even want it).

Failing that... maybe Valve.They're already trying to turn SteamDeck and SteamOS into something that runs and works on everything. They've got obscene amounts of money. Xbox could be a great already-installed base as well as give them additional studios to make games for their platform. Though this seems less likely than AMD.

Considering how easy it is to port or support a game on Linux or Mac these days with WINE (with vibe coding), even Windows support seems a diminished quality for gaming.

I've personally taken 2 old games and made them playable on MacOS just vibing them. One was Homeworld, and the other was an indie game (the name of which I can't remember, but it was in the theme of Thief).

There was a time not that distant from now when Microsoft was getting a significant percentage of their revenue from gaming. This seems like they're slaughtering their sacred cow.

I can't see much upside for Microsoft in the future. They're basically moving cloud-only for most products, except for Windows itself. I understand how that works on the books, but I don't see how well that works for their customers. They're shrinking their market substantially to cater to larger and larger enterprises.

(THeir GPU investments have largely been a loss leader for their other cloud services... "data has inertia" or however that saying goes: storage, compute, and network activity on their cloud which wouldn't have gotten used if not for people moving data to the cloud to process it, subsidizes the discounted GPUs. All the cloud providers are doing this.)

Yeah, but why not? You're clearly not doing anything with the property. Might as well let someone get good use out of it.

Microsoft seems intent on destroying every one of their valuable properties with enshitification, trying to pull the last dollar out of existing products instead of innovating or providing anything for their customers.

As for Xbox being a loss leader... what are they smoking? The boxes themselves have been for a long time, that's just game industry economics. They've already divested from that, pushing the hardware cost onto manufacturers, which is sure to make the platform price go up. But the software side of that business? It's always been incredibly lucrative.

What have MS done, lately? The only things that come to mind are increased "vertical integration", pushing their customers to the cloud while at the same time increasing the licensing costs and decreasing the quality and usability of all of their self-hosted products. Managing Windows has become increasingly difficult, and once useful tools don't even work. The tools that do work, Powershell, usually don't even work, with constant drift across products as to what works and what doesn't.

There are further cultural observations to make specifically related to Xbox, but I'm sure that would get some people in a tizzy.

The editors don't edit or care enough to listen. The owners don't care either, despite the old Slashdot having vastly more users.

Being "Slashdotted" by users flocking to mentioned sites went away along with Slashdot influence.

They'll likely sell tons of them to users who don't need more than what those specs deliver. In ancient times netbooks sold well despite weak specs.

No electronic records are "safe", unless air-gapped.

It's not practical to have widely used systems and completely effective security. Humans and computers are inherently fallible.

They probably need another trillion dollars and this time they'll do it right!

No accountability, no consequences for failure.

It isn't sociopaths which makes a product good, it's engineering.

France specifically, and Europe more generally, lacks the economic incentives to keep the best and brightest employed at frontier level work. The European "IT industry" is all but dead.

No, that clearly isn't what Jesus meant, and it's made excruciatingly clear that faith without action is dead. Heart condition -> action -> salvation. You can't omit a step.

That's interesting, because I've seen the exact opposite play out twice in our small local schools. There's a "measles outbreak", and they rush to blame the unvaccinated, but it's only vaccinated kids who end up getting sick.

Scapegoating does not exclude guilt. People lacking political pull are easily fed to the lions.

We got M13 in the early 1980s to use in exercise (aircraft hydraulic fluid simulated agent since the strips were basically PH test strips similar to those used in swimming pools) and wore the olive green CPOG with flappy overboots (until someone figured out rain boots were better in every way and not prone to holes).

The later gear is much comfier, and unlike M17 masks troops don't have to remove a contaminated mask to replace filters....

In US practice expired CBRN ensembles and others stencilled "For Training Use Only" are the standard during military exercises. In case of war new gear is issued.

When troops go through decontamination they doff their contaminated gear for processing or disposal, they shower etc and new or clean gear is issued.