Without Vista drivers, it's 2001 all over again

John Crandall, HP’s director of strategic alliances in the company’s imaging and printing group, said a driver for the 7400C is coming.

But a look at the scanner’s history, and how drivers are developed, provides insight into the driver time lag on some products.

Although the scanner went on the market in 2001, “it was probably designed in 1999, when there was an anticipation of XP in mind, not Vista,” Crandall said.

The imaging and printing division started working on Vista in the spring of 2002; the company stopped selling the 7400C in 2003, he said.

The division has “a plan of (Vista driver) support for 450 ‘legacy’ imaging and printing products,” based on what it hears from customers, Crandall said.

At Vista’s launch, 280 HP drivers for various imaging and printing products were included on the Vista installation disc, he said.

Wascha, of Microsoft, said that the company worked with “thousands of partners” during the development phase of Vista, most of whom have been responsible and responsive to creating drivers that will work with the new OS.

But, he said, some companies aren’t, whether it’s for lack of interest or funding. 

“Some don’t answer the phone, and some are out of business,” he said.

Robert McLaws, a software consultant who runs the Windows Now Web site, was among the beta testers of Vista for three years before its release.

“It’s not like Vista was any surprise” for manufacturers, he said.

“There was three to five years’ lead time for hardware vendors. Some aren’t interested in committing resources until much later in the game.”

McLaws said that Microsoft has “banks and banks of computers to test (drivers) with obscure vendors. But Microsoft can only drag vendors so far. It’s got to be up to the companies to provide the drivers” for testing.

Will there ever come a time when drivers aren’t needed?      

“There’s never going to be a driver-free world,” said Crandall of HP.

“But we are working on ways to make them much more simpler,” and in some cases, more “universal.”

HP’s “Picture Transfer Protocol,” for example, he said, is the kind of driver that can be used with any HP camera to connect to “any Microsoft product since Millennium Edition (Me), and transfer photos to a computer.”

“As long as peripherals become more and more sophisticated and complex, they also require more and more additional software, including device drivers,” said Pohjola, the consultant.

He said the driver problem “is not only limited to Windows versions, It’s also an issue with different Linux- and UNIX-platforms running on PC hardware.

“A good example is my USB DigiTV tuner. I haven’t succeeded to get it work with any kind of OS yet.”

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