- Family member has 720p webcam
- Family member buys shiny new 1080p webcam
- Family member plugs in shiny new webcam and gives me a videocall to test it
- New camera works flawlessly. I get to keep the old 720p cam. Yippee!!
…BUT THEN
- Family member goes to the website listed on camera’s packaging and clicks the big blue download button
- download button installs custom usb driver and companion app
- companion app has twenty quadrillion toggles and dials spread across fifty billion tabs and sub menus. Family member spends all evening twiddling with it.
- No matter what, the image looks like crap. Too bright, but not enough contrast. Worse than it did originally.
- next day family member asks for his old 720p webcam back, I get to keep the 1080p webcam
I’m happy with my new webcam so I’m not complaining, but why do people do this?? Why do manufacturers make these shitty custom driver? The whole point of USB is to be plug-and-play without any custom software.
There was also the prolific serial to USB components. The market was flooded with perfectly functional clones. Prolific deliberately broke support for clones, penalizing a ton of people who had no idea.
When people did too good a job cloning some of their chips, they made the driver break even their own chips.
Of course, in this case the vendor got their stuff into the standard Windows driver without even needing users to download anything…
The ultimate effect is that our datacenter just uses Linux laptops because in practice serial adapters for Windows are just too unreliable unless we try to be supply chain detectives for the cheap little serial adapters we buy.