Microsoft Says Kinect Left Open By Design

kai_hiwatari writes "Around two week ago when Adafruit announced a bounty for developing an open-source driver for the Kinect, Microsoft made it clear that they didn't condone it. Now Microsoft seems to have realized the potential of their device and has made a U-turn. Alex Kipman, Xbox Director of Incubation, now says that they left the Kinect open by design. Kipman said, 'What has happened is someone wrote an open-source driver for PCs that essentially opens the USB connection, which we didn't protect, by design, and reads the inputs from the sensor.'"

Oh yeah

[Anonymous Coward]

We totally meant to do that cool thing you guys thought we didn't mean to do ... and stuff.

Needs more Xbox

[slyborg]

I think what he meant to say about the earlier statement was that Microsoft turned 360 degrees and walked away from it.

And while we're at it...

[broKenfoLd]

"We also /wanted/ the Kin to fail after like 9 minutes on the market as a learning experience for our Win7 phone team"

Re:open by design? My ass!

[hedwards]

I'm sorry sir, but this isn't the appropriate venue to offer those sorts of services. I'd refer you to Craig's list, but apparently they aren't that sort of venue either.

Re:Oh yeah

[hduff]

We totally meant to do that cool thing you guys thought we didn't mean to do ... and stuff.

And "by design", they mean "accidentally".