The key to Windows success? It's all about the drivers

The greatest advantage of the Windows ecosystem is that there are so many choices.

The biggest problem with the Windows ecosystem is that there are so many choices.

Ironic, isn’t it?

The sheer number of choices means you can almost certainly find exactly the PC you want. In the notebook category alone, you can get a two-pound ultraportable or a 20-pound desktop replacement, or anything in between, with or without Tablet or touchscreen features. You can opt for a system with a battery life of 6-8 hours or one that will run like a bat out of hell for 80 minutes. If you prefer a desktop, you can take your pick of giant towers, midsize towers, small form factor cases designed to fit in AV equipment racks, or all-in one designs, with a dizzying range of expansion options. For a Windows PC, you can spend $500, $5000, or anything in between.

All those choices give you a practically infinite number of hardware and software combinations. And that’s where the problems begin. All those choices also offer a correspondingly large chance of encountering problems from the unexpected interaction of parts that weren’t designed to be used together.

That, in large part, is why Windows Vista has struggled for the past 18 months.

The good news is that the ecosystem has finally settled down, and stable Vista drivers are now available for virtually all of the components that go into a 2008-vintage PC. But getting those drivers to users is still a problem, because of the way the OEM business model works. Understanding this process goes a long way to explaining why there’s no such thing as a universal Windows experience. Here’s the broad outline of how a Windows PC comes to life for a consumer:

1. OEM engineers design the system using mostly off-the-shelf parts and standard components. Some of those parts are universal: you need a CPU and matching chipset, plus video and audio subsystems, networking capability, and a storage controller. The desire to keep prices down creates a powerful economic interest to consolidate as many of those functions as possible on the motherboard, especially for notebooks and budget desktops.
2. OEM engineers create a hardware package for all those parts. For desktops, this used to be a beige box. Today, there’s more attention to design and the beige box is mostly a relic. Notebook designers have to pay excruciating attention to detail to find the right balance of cost, weight, performance, ruggedness, battery life, and coolness.
3. Software engineers combine the operating system, hardware drivers, and utilities (plus system firmware) into a system image. The choice that most people will notice is the operating system, but getting the right drivers and associated utilities for the components chosen in Step 1 is far more important in terms of getting a system that works well. Drivers for some components are part of the base OS. In other cases, drivers and associated utilities are provided by the supplier of the component. For example, many motherboard designs (desktop and notebook) use audio circuitry from IDT (formerly SigmaTel), which in turn provides a driver as part of its deal with the system maker. Graphics subsystems are most likely to use chips from Intel, Nvidia, or ATI, which provide drivers designed for use with that specific chip.
4. Marketing adds branding and additional software and services. The branding involves putting the company logo and support contact information on the Windows Welcome screen and possibly adding some custom wallpaper or screen savers. The additional software in this step consists of fully functional, fully licensed programs (purchased from third parties or developed in-house) and intended to add value to the system. Common add-ons in this category are CD/DVD burning programs and DVD players. For build-to-order products, the customer might be offered a choice of products to preinstall at discounted OEM prices. Microsoft Office and various antivirus programs are the most popular examples of this category.
5. Marketing adds trialware. The developers of these programs pay a fee for each installed copy and may also pay a spiff (commission) for each user that pays to convert the trialware program to a fully licensed copy. If the OEM goes overboard, these programs earn the label “crapware.”
6. The OEM sells the finished product to consumers. If the finished product is sold through the retail channel (Best Buy, Costco, any of a gazillion mail-order vendors), the software image on the finished system may be many months old. For a build-to-order product from a company like Dell, the software image is far more likely to be up to date.
7. The OEM provides updated drivers and utilities to customers. Remember, many of the component suppliers want nothing to do with end-user support. If they produce a new, improved driver or utility package, they make it available to the OEM, which in turn gets to decide when and how to deliver it to customers.

Continued: Where PC makers go wrong –>