I dug out an old (not that old actually, only a few years) Logitech webcam the other day. I was hoping to use it with my laptop. Problem is, because it’s a few years old and uses proprietary drivers, it won’t work with Windows 7.
It won’t work, not because the hardware is incompatible or anything like that, but because Logitech took the decision that the advent of a new operating system was a great opportunity to force its users to buy new webcams. They simply refuse to create drivers to allow their older products to work with newer operating systems.
Hewlett Packard have the same philosophy with their scanners. Scanners that worked perfectly well in XP no longer work in Windows 7 purely because HP decided to force people to buy new hardware rather than create new drivers.
We wouldn’t put up with having to buy a new car every time the speed limit changed so why do we have to put up with this cynical manipulation of the market by manufacturers.
A few years ago we’d have been able to get around this by reverse engineering the products and creating our own drivers. Sadly, our politicians, who seem to sign any bit of paper passed in front of them if it’s accompanied by suitable recompense, made that illegal.
The only course of action open to us now then seems to be to simply throw perfectly serviceable hardware away and replace it with brand new more expensive devices. The politicians then cry foul over the amount of electrical waste that’s produced, not having the sense to realise they’ve caused half the problems themselves.
