Microsoft’s stance on tinkering with their latest consumer products, namely Kinect and now their latest Windows Phone OS (Mango) has been a developer/hacker-friendly position to take.

In fact, they almost seem to welcome messing around under the hood with their latest Mango release to beta testers in their response to AllThingsD’s by Microsoft’s Bill Cox:

Microsoft was in an opposite mindset when Kinect first hit the streets saying they would “…continue to make advances in these types of safeguards and work closely with law enforcement and product safety groups to keep Kinect tamper-resistant.” Microsoft then changed their tune on people hacking/tampering with the Kinect saying they were “excited to see that people are so inspired” to use and create new ways to use the Kinect peripheral.

I tend to appreciate their attitude towards tinkering and agree with WMPoweruser’s assessment (about the Mango “tinkering”) that this loose attitude with their products may very well be what has kept hackers away from their services and keened in on the like of Sony and Apple as of late. Of course, Microsoft has been known to take security very seriously, so the “plucking the low-hanging fruit” theory is probably not too far off either. Either way, as Microsoft notes, “tinker away”, but do so at your own risk.

Source: AllThings D