Say what you will about Microsoft, but without Bill Gates and his dream our world  probably wouldn’t look the same, and now another Microsoft product is looking to forever change the world for a whole new group of people in our society.

Kinect has been a runaway success from the moment it was released, and with a nod from Microsoft, hackers have taken it to places in our technological world, places I don’t think even Microsoft foresaw.

In that same vein, the Kinect is bringing the world of gaming to a segment of our society that could never join in and play with their friends and family.

It is a story that Microsoft has been hearing with increasing frequency as more people start using Kinect, and in some cases the results are not only incredibly heartwarming but dramatic, especially when you take into account the types of disabilities these children are afflicted with.

Todd Rosen, an optimized desktop specialist in Microsoft’s New York City office, started hearing some of these stories just days after Kinect launched. When he read an article about a child with autism using Kinect, he knew he had to get one. Like the boy in the article, Rosen’s children had struggled to play games. His 12-year-old son, Matthew, has autism, and his 5-year-old daughter, Sarah, has cerebral palsy.

Over the years Rosen has purchased a PlayStation, an Xbox and a Wii. They’ve all been too hard for Mathew and Sarah, though, and they usually just sit back and watch as their friends play. “The controllers always had too many buttons on them,” he said. “Then we tried the Wii, which we thought would be simple. But it had two controllers, buttons and knobs, and you have to move your body. My daughter couldn’t do it, and Matthew was just lost.”

Within a few minutes of setting Kinect up, though, Matthew was playing. “It was the most amazing thing,” Rosen said. “I’ve never seen him smile in front of a video game. He always looked confused or puzzled. But he was playing. The other kids were watching him, not helping him.”

As Sarah watched her brother, she wanted to join in, too. So Rosen pushed her wheelchair in front of the TV. “All of a sudden Kinect picked her up, and it doesn’t recognize that she’s in a wheelchair but shows her as a shorter person,” he said. “Instantly she’s beyond excited, her hands and arms are flailing, and she’s doing stuff in the game.”

Rosen moved Sarah into a dining room chair so she could swing her legs. She wound up playing until she fell asleep. When she woke up the next day, the first thing she wanted to do was play Kinect.

via Microsoft

Like I said earlier, you can say all you want about Microsoft and how it is old, antiquated, company that couldn’t innovate if its  life depended on it; but the fact is that every once in awhile Microsoft does something incredible.

It may not be the cool shiny flash-in-the-pan type of thing that we tend to think is so important these days, but as we saw with how DOS and Windows forever changed our world. Now we are seeing how Kinect is changing the lives of children, and people in general.  Personally, I’ll take that over some flashy gizmo or overbearing social network.

[Cross-posted at Winextra]