It's easy to dismiss Xbox's new Kinect controller-free sensor as a "Wii Too" product.

But I wonder whether Microsoft is onto something much bigger, something that will take the innovations introduced for the Xbox into the broader sphere of personal computing.

Sure, from the perspective of gaming in 2010, it doesn't offer much that Nintendo's Wii doesn't already have – as we pointed out in our review of Kinect in June.

But for one thing, Kinect doesn't just record your movements. Its system of cameras, microphones, sensors and software algorithms also records (and recognizes) your voice, and can recognize faces and objects. For another, it didn't come directly from the gaming and entertainment division at Microsoft, trying to copy the Wii. It grew out of Microsoft's research labs, from a combination of teams already working on alternative input systems for computing devices. Gaming is a high-profile test case for their implementation.

Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer at Microsoft, told Computerworld on Thursday that Kinect "portends a revolution in the way people will interact with computers." Bill Gates suggested something very similar at the D5 conference in 2007: The real transformation of the desktop metaphor for the PC would come through innovations in three-dimensional imaging. PCs and games were both held back by their reliance on the mouse/keyboard and the controller, Gates said:

[The Wiimote is] a 3D positional device. This is video recognition. This is a camera seeing what’s going on. And, you know, in the meetings, like you’re on a video conference, you don’t know who’s speaking, you know, they’re audio only, things like that. The camera will be ubiquitous. Now, of course, we have to design it in a way that people’s expectations about privacy are handled appropriately, but software can do vision and it can do it very, very inexpensively. And that means this stuff becomes pervasive. You don’t just talk about it being in a laptop device. You talk about it being part of the meeting room or the living room.

For a useful analogy and some historical perspective, let's go back to October 2001. On October 25, Microsoft released Windows XP, still the most popular desktop operating system in the world. Two days earlier, Apple introduced the iPod, the most successful digital music and media player ever. Over the next nine years, what happened?

One of Apple's shrewdest moves in the past decade was to embrace the iPod as the technological and commercial driver of its core businesses. The iPod was universally hailed as the top device in its class, technologically sophisticated and culturally cool. iTunes gave Apple footholds in retail (first for music, then other media) and on the PC platform. It was the first post-PC device that along with digital cameras and video, let Apple remake the personal computer from a workstation into a digital media hub by way of iLife. Then, in rapid succession, the iPod begat the iPhone, Apple TV, and the iPad. Apple brought multitouch interfaces to its laptops, and now its desktops via the Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad. It's a huge, diversified company, but it all springs from the success of the iPod.

Over the same period, Microsoft lost a lot of its reputation as an innovator, especially in the retail market. It settled its antitrust case with the DOJ. Its web browser and new Windows OS were widely reviled. It tried (and largely failed) to get strong positions in search, smartphones, and music players.

But the Xbox is different. Critics and fans love it; it has sold (and continually grown) like gangbusters; it's been widely perceived as both serious and cool; it's had landmark games like Halo, BioShock, and Final Fantasy XIII; and with XBox Live it arguably did more than any other product to actually bring proper networked computing into people's living rooms.

Apple's iPod, and then the iPhone, have given the company a direction for the future: innovative cloud and boutique retail, selling handheld computing devices driven by multi-touch interfaces. It's a very different path than if Apple had continued to follow the roadmap offered by the Mac.

If Microsoft follows the Xbox rather than Windows and Office, or rather than chasing after Apple in tablets or Google in search, we'll see it become a company less defined by enterprise solutions and spreadsheets than by ubiquitous, large-scale, multi-surface household computing.

Photo credit: Allthingsd.com