Yea, I knew I'd get stung by this. Should I have gone with "consumer" ? Or "mindshare" instead of "relevance" ?
What I intended to get across was that I think Microsoft would love to use Kinect as a platform to recover some of its losses in the mobile, search, and cloud computing spaces, essentially to establish it as the new Microsoft platform to lock in users.
Not exactly a crystal clear explanation, admittedly.
What you wanted to say is that MS is and has been uncool to developers and no one would touch their shite unless coerced by bills or held captive by an employer visa.
(no need to mince words)
Microsoft Sucks(TM) but they have never been good at, or even wanted, consumer lock-in. Microsoft Sucks(TM) but they're not evil, not by a long shot, or at least not good at it.
To us, developers, they're Useful Idiots[1] who do pro-developer things inadvertently, while trying to be evil. Case in point, they made their entire platform COM-enabled in order to ensure Office interop and "invite" people into VB. Really, they had the Web flashing in bright neon and all the dotcoms of the late 90s for omens, and all they thought was "yeah, the future is MS Office, let's just make Windows super accessible" ..
What happened is that the entire MS platform became "callable" from other stacks and people built their own stacks on top of MS'. Flash, Mozilla, Java, Open Office, VMWare, etc. None of them could have existed if MS was "competently evil" at locking down the win32 platform as Apple is at locking down the iThing.
Really, Microsoft sucks at being evil so bad that they're actually benevolent. If I was Roger Corman, shooting a cheap horror flick, I would yell at MS and tell it to get its act together, or get back to Denny's for their shift (most of Corman's lead actors were wait-staff); that's not a way for a proper villain to behave. Truly, the Eric Cartman of bad guys.
I see more and more people view Microsoft as a harmless, disoriented giant, just like IBM. Thing is, both were actively evil in their heyday. They killed, raped and pillaged until they become granddads and settled.
What I intended to get across was that I think Microsoft would love to use Kinect as a platform to recover some of its losses in the mobile, search, and cloud computing spaces, essentially to establish it as the new Microsoft platform to lock in users.
Not exactly a crystal clear explanation, admittedly.