Meanwhile, back in Redmond, Microsoft (!) has opened the Kinect to 3rd party developers.
I doubt this was done to deliberately underscore the galactic idiocy of their chief rival. Still, the contrast between the two approaches is pretty astonishing.
A company supporting their involved, early adopting developer base? What?
In all seriousness, its a huge marketing backfire for Sony to act in this manner, and a huge plus for Microsoft in it's respective choice. I understand the "magic black box" theory of product development as it referes to the 99% of the population that doesn't mod, but that 1% is a vital asset who's influence far exceeds their numbers.
These two populations are inherently different, and should be treated as such. It would be a bad marketing move in this day and age to force typical users to hack, and its an equally bad move to force hacker users to follow suit.
Perhaps somebody at Sony HQ is reasoning along the lines, ``it's more important to be talked/written about, than it to be only positive news'' -- all this bickering about PS3 keys and Other OS feature created quite a bit of publicity anyway.
Microsoft's new 'hacker-friendly' approach is refreshing, but I'll be interested to see how long it lasts or how deep it goes. It's a great way to curry favor with developers, which is critically important if WP7 is to be a success, but when push comes to shove I have a sneaking suspicion we'll see the old Microsoft take over.
I doubt this was done to deliberately underscore the galactic idiocy of their chief rival. Still, the contrast between the two approaches is pretty astonishing.