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 :)
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.