Kinect is probably the best thing to come out of Microsoft in a while. If Kinect had come out in the late 90s or even early 2000 (go along for argument's sake) I doubt if Microsoft would have been this ready to embrace community hacking of kinect. More likely we would have seen the heavy handed actions that were synonymous of Microsoft that would have nipped these in the bud and we would have never seen the likes of cool hacks that Kinect is now famous for.

I still wonder how Kinect came out of a Microsoft led by Ballmer.

By change, do they mean waiving my arms around all over the place, or are we talking something more subtle? Here's the rub. A remote control is a means to an end. It is a pathway for my cognitive decision to change channels or search for content. Ideally, the remote should disappear in to the background. I shouldn't think about the fact that I'm using it. I don't see how the Kinect puts me any closer to that goal. What I've read so far -- and this may change -- is that the Kinect works best when you're standing up. Even if it did work well when sitting, I can use a remote by lifting my thumb. The Kinect would require some sort of gesture that involves a lot more motion. The usual gorilla arms arguments apply.

What would be far more useful is if home entertainment manufacturers solidified a protocol for devices to talk to one another, so that we could ditch all these remotes.

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This person is dead-wrong about MSFT being a failure in television. They have Mediaroom (http://www.microsoft.com/mediaroom/) which companies as big as AT&T use as their software on phone/internet/television networks.