There is a million reasons why one annouces such things, mostly they annouce this stuff to get some PR talk. The main reason in MS case, is because there is a lot of shareholders that are against the whole Console business movement, and this will enable them to say "we are profitable" even tho in reality they are not.
Everybody who are supposed to know, knows the reality, it just office politics.
Just like every company in the world issues statements about profitability, even thought if you discount the projects realistically its actually loosing money.
Your just making up theories based on your own perception of how this stuff works. IT IRRELEVANT for an investor wether you record the loss right now or next year, you still get all the info you need. You for some reason seem to believe that by registering the loss right now you can hide the reality from serious investors.
Further, as an investor your in NO need to know how every division is doing, very very rarely will a potential shareholder do this. Even rarer, will a shareholder NOT look at last years results.
I want to point out that these two text blocks are semi-contradictory; in the fist you state the reasons why a company would structure the announcement this way - i.e. because investors care - and in the second you go to lengths to say that investors don't care.
No two companies are viewed the same, and just as it would be ludicrous to think that year after year SCE's individual results aren't put under a microscope irrespective of Sony's larger earnings, so to is it the case (though to a lesser extent) with the Entertainment and Devices division. How large or small a part of the overall business does not matter in terms of the 'feel' the investment community has with respect to these operations - they read the headlines, they don't have
that much time to research, and by seeing analyst reports you see what the "professionals" in the industry are affected by... read: these people are fickle and not often fully aware of all pertinent facts.
It doesn't matter that this loss is more or less irrelevant in the larger scheme of things at MS - for better or worse a flag has been planted concerning profitability for the division. I'm not saying it's right or fair, but it's very real. Al major XBox execs - and now with the CFO of Microsoft on stage - have said that the division will be profitable in '08. This is no trivial thing - although you and I might be able to perceive it relativistically and see a $10 million profit is not so different from a $10 million loss, that is not what the headlines will read, and MS is well aware of this.
The console business, for whatever reason, is simply more romantic than the core operations over at MS and Sony, and thus naturally garner more of even the mainstream press with their fiscal performances.
I personally think that with the $1 billion charge taken in advance in '07, profitability is well within reach this year, and a root cause for how this was structured. They want to present an image to the community of "our issues are behind us."
Again, as you have been told three times allready, Since when does companies pay induvidual taxes per division? You still want to record the biggest losses when you have the highest profit in order to minimize tax.
Making up crazy theories about how this will somehow fool investors is silly.
The tax angle is a red herring in this case, because at no time would the console divisions losses be large enough to materially offset the rest of the company's profits in such a way that there would be an appreciable gain relative one year vs the next. From a macro-corporate standpoint, the only advantage here is that the earnings across quarters and years can be better managed; Wall Street likes stability.
Robbie Bach 
