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Personal Note to Joystiq: There is no Coding4Fun Wii60 Conspiracy

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Some of you may have seen the recent Joystiq post "MS gift guide suggests Wii controller", also linked to here and here quoted below.

Ever since Peter Moore made his famous statement ostensibly encouraging people to buy a Nintendo Wii , the Wii60 ideal of Nintendo/Microsoft solidarity has become something of a phenomenon. The idea of the the two companies cooperating against Sony has persisted despite few public signs of any sort of alliance. Well, throw another log on the fire, because Microsoft Developer Network site Coding4Fun has posted a gift guide recommending a Wii remote for "your favorite engineer or technology elitist."
Granted, the site recommends the Wii controller for use as a hackable, motion-sensitive Bluetooth controller for the PC and not for its console gaming capabilities. For the most part, though, the rest of the guide seems to opt for Microsoft-branded products like Visual Studio C++ and Flight Simulator X over competing products in the same categories. Then again, we suppose it would have looked a little out of touch to recommend the eight-year-old Microsoft Sidewinder Freestyle Pro for the motion-sensitive hacker on you list.

 

I found this amusing, as I am a Joystiq fan, but I thought I would give a quick Q&A response and assure Sony fans that there is, in fact, no conspiracy :)

  • Who wrote the guide?   Clint and I did and we did not get any input from the Xbox team
  • Why did you add the Wii Remote Controller? Because it's hackable in the sense that Microsoft developers can program against it. That's the goal of Coding4Fun, to show fun and cool things that Microsoft developers can program with. I only wish Nintendo would have put a more open, supported API for their controller, but hopefully that will happen in the future.
  • Why didn't we add other competing products?   The reason Flight Simulator X was added is because for the first time in 10 years, Flight Simulator has an open API that Microsoft developers can program. The fact that it's a Microsoft product is just gravy. In fact, the majority of the presents in the gift guide are not Microsoft owned products. If you can find other products that Microsoft developers can program, then yeah, we'll add them - code4fun@microsoft.com. 
  • Where did you get the price from? Where possible, we decided to use Amazon.com for all gifts in the Gift Guide and that was the cheapest new and used price at the time the guide was published. The new and used price is actually pricier now ($64), likely because of the many folks interested in tinkering with the remote as well.

 

Again, there is no grand conspiracy, if it's programmable using Microsoft tools and not illegal, then we'll showcase it, the same way Coding4Fun has programmable articles on Google's Search API, Yahoo's Flickr Service or how to read your music library from iTunes. We didn't, for example, showcase Microsoft's big gift for this holiday season, the Zune, because it's not programmable.

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