Lee initially declined to comment for this article, but he did e-mail me a response to Kipman’s account: “The tremendous amount of positive press coverage on Kinect projects in the months immediately following launch was worth tens of millions dollars in marketing for Xbox — and remains one of the most culturally interesting aspects of this product, keeping us actively talking about the technology today. Stimulating that for $3,000 seems like good business sense to me.”

Either way, the incident seemed to burnish Microsoft’s reputation. Wired even published an article crediting Microsoft for its forward-thinking attitude toward collaborating with the masses: “No company has made it so easy to hack into a product as popular as the Kinect,” the article asserted, implying that the company planned on home-brew innovators as crucial strategic partners. So I thought I was throwing Kipman a softball when I asked if all the hubbub had ultimately helped Kinect’s highly successful launch.

Not really, Kipman replied. Off-label creators numbered “maybe a thousand,” and millions of Kinect buyers have no awareness of their existence. “We still want to foster” that community, he allowed. “But from the perspective of a multibillion-dollar program, it was neutral. It was neither good nor bad.”

Kinect hackers may not have cared about video games, but what they wanted — a device containing specific high-tech components for just $150 — was achievable specifically because of its connection to something with the scale of the Xbox system. Only a company the size of Microsoft could afford the massive research-and-development costs, and only mass-market appeal could make such a product financially viable.

Kyle McDonald, a digital artist based in Brooklyn, had been working with 3-D sensor technology for years when the Kinect came out, so at first he underestimated the significance of Microsoft’s latest product. But within a week, the hacker videos and online commentary changed his mind, and he bought one. This is evidence of something even more surprising than the possibility that Microsoft had learned to love the hackers: Outsider tech creators have learned to love a Microsoft product. Or if not love, then at least take it seriously. McDonald teaches a class at New York University on “appropriating new technologies.” The goal of any given Kinect hack, he says, isn’t simply to create a high-tech puppet show but to understand how the device works and what its function could be.

The theory that companies should wholeheartedly embrace strange experimentations of people like McDonald turns on a straightforward idea: It’s good for the bottom line. “You get unexpected uses of your products that might contribute to a different direction your company can go,” says Bas van Abel, a designer in Utrecht, the Netherlands, and co-author of the book “Open Design Now.” Established companies may still resist that argument, but more and more upstarts take it for granted that a community of customers, hobbyists and amateurs (or, as van Abel prefers, hackers and artists) will innovate well beyond what any firm can come up with on its own.

According to Henry Chesbrough, a business professor at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of “Open Innovation,” even mainstream companies are starting to agree that tech hobbyists aren’t just consumers but creative partners. This, he says, is purely pragmatic: “We can get more done with less resources by collaborating, cooperating with this community.” He points to Lego’s capitalizing on the unexpected (and decidedly fringy) inventions by users of its Mindstorms motor kits, essentially expanding the company’s place in the mainstream and lucrative education market.