But what if a PS4 owner wants to play with friends who own X1s and/or Switchs? They're out of luck.

Now the tables have turned MS wants to make cross-play possible, but last gen when Sony asked them they refused.
Probably because Xbox-players who were paying to play online on X360 couldn't be playing with/against players that played online for free on PS3 because if they would find out that the free online gaming was just as good they would start to lose paying costumers.
And now MS's PR-machine is spinning it around ... as usual.

Luckily in most of the world nearly everybody has a ps4 and not xb1. In places like UK/USA they can buy a PS4 and join their buddies.  

And anyway you can't play with your friends.  Take RL for example.  I can choose to play against pc players but there's no way to decide who. It's just all randoms so your idea doesn't work in cases where there actually is crossplay. 

MS's PR machine isn't the only one spinning.

I'm not terribly familiar with how crossplay works but this current iteration of crossplay could be a first step towards enacting more potent forms of crossplay wherein players would be able to play with friends across different platforms.

I think that would be a nice thing 4 players to have.

Nah.  console/pc cross play has been around since last gen and it's still the same.  considering you won't be able to play with your friends on rival consoles you can see now that Sony don't have much to gain with this.  

But there competitors MS do.  Last gen MS refused so as I've said they don't deserve to have the massive ps4 userbase up the population on their servers. 

 Here's  his full reponses to the topic.

Q1

Jim Ryan: It's certainly not a profound philosophical stance we have against this. We've done it in the past. We're always open to conversations with any developer or publisher who wants to talk about it. Unfortunately it's a commercial discussion between ourselves and other stakeholders, and I'm not going to get into the detail of that on this particular instance. And I can see your eyes rolling.

Q2

Jim Ryan: Yeah. We've got to be mindful of our responsibility to our install base. Minecraft - the demographic playing that, you know as well as I do, it's all ages but it's also very young. We have a contract with the people who go online with us, that we look after them and they are within the PlayStation curated universe. Exposing what in many cases are children to external influences we have no ability to manage or look after, it's something we have to think about very carefully.

Q3

Jim Ryan: Yeah, that's true. Everybody has to take their own decisions. We'll do that. Like I say, we have no philosophical stance against cross-play at all.

Q4

Jim Ryan: I don't think anything is ever a done deal. Anybody who is dogmatic in that manner is typically a fool. That said, to my knowledge, there is no live conversation ongoing at the moment.

It just doesn't didn't want to explain the real reason why and he said in the first reponse to it.  I don't know why they're not allowing it but most of the time they do. I don't care about this because I don't care about minecraft.

How does MS stand to benefit from this?

Do Nintendo fans reading this now see how rediculously stupid it looks when the platform holder excuses the lack of a feature on "protecting kids", now that it's not-nintendo doing it?

I hope so, because it's a retarded excuse regardless of who is doing it.

Way less people own XB1's then ps4. So their multiplatform online games populations will die own or become less active far quicker than ps4. If they had access to ps4 players it would really help keep the numbers up a lot longer. 

Yeah, the Minecraft servers are going to become ghost towns LOL.