I've been doing some google research on this. Apparently XBox Kinect worked with windows up until sometime in 2012 or 2013 when MS stopped allowing it to work (?) I'm assuming in order to promote/encourage the (higher priced) kinect for windows and its SDK. 

Kinect for windows v2 just released on July 15, 2014 and the SDK available on their front page is a beta v2. From what I'm digging up so far, v2 doesn't work with windows 7. It's only Win8.1+ compatible, which lets me out, as there's no chance in frozen hell I'm ever upgrading to the pOS that is win8. So I'll be waiting for win9 to see if that gets me to upgrade. I wonder however if the new kinect will work on the sdk v2. Most likely not.

MS pulled the kinect out of the new xbox due to customer complaints about its "always on" features or some such. Not clear on the details around that but there was a bit of a stink about it a few months back. That dropped the price of the xbox one by $100, but now people are complaining that the new kinect is $200. While the old kinect for Windows is still about $250, with less features, but win7 support. So I'm failing to see the problem people are having here.