Re: No More Windows/Xbox Franken-Handheld?

Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote at 00:04 this Tuesday (GMT):

Feeling the heat from the success of the handheld Steam Deck gaming
PC, Microsoft let some leaks out a few months ago that it was working
on a combined XBox/Windows device that would compete better in some
undefined way.
>
I never understood what the synergy was going to be in such a
Frankenproduct. And now it seems Microsoft might be giving up on this
idea anyway, or at least postponing it.
>
Looks like it is going back to trying to improve the usability of
native Windows itself on the handheld form factor. In the early days
of the Steam Deck a few years ago, it was showing off something called
“Windows Handheld Mode”, but that never came to production. It looked
like the idea had been abandoned in favour of this Xbox+Windows hack.
>
So it is giving up on one idea that wouldn’t work, to go back to
another idea that wouldn’t work?? This doesn’t sound like a company
that has any coherent strategy to compete in this market.
>
<https://www.tomshardware.com/software/windows/microsoft-shelves-first-party-xbox-handheld-to-work-on-windows-11-portable-performance>

I'd guess that whole thing is a response to the Steam Deck. MS has a
history of jumping between gimmicks and forcing their design philosophy
onto the entire product (see: xbox 360 and kinect, win8 and the tablet
mode stuff, win11 and the godawful ai integration, minecraft)

The whole hybrid idea baffles me even more because there's already a lot
of Xbox integration into Windows in the first place? You can apparently
run Xbox games natively and theres a whole app dedicated to it, which
makes me think the whole hybrid idea is either 1) a marketing ploy to
make it sound better to consumera, and not actually changing anything
or 2) A Windows NT situation where they completely lock down the OS so
the only thing you can do with it is launch games from the Xbox app.
--
user <candycane> is generated from /dev/urandom