I love working in the software industry: it moves fast because copying the right solution is easy, so we don’t spend forever re-inventing the wheel (or at least that’s the ideal).

So why in this day and age am I still having trouble with drivers?

Case in point: I have a Lifecam VX-3000 Download Software, although you’ll have to re-enter the product you want drivers for. Even worse, you’ll need to know whether you have a 64 bit or a 32 bit version of Windows installed, and I know Microsoft employees who don’t know that).

And then watch out! The drivers are trapped in a mysterious LC14.exe which is a mysterious file well north of 100 megs.

On the other hand, there’s the Gyration Mouse I bought on a whim (I was on sale; Bountii has it at $99 right now, but I’m sure I spent under $30). Now this is kind of like a mouse except it uses gyroscopes, basically it’s a weird laser mouse hybrid for nerds from a small company I’ve never heard of — I could understand if the drivers weren’t 100% smooth.

Except they were. And if the autoplay hadn’t worked, all the software I needed was right there on 256megs of memory on the device itself. Which raises two points:

• Why don’t all USB peripherals have some flash memory? It’s just too useful, and it can’t add more than a pitance to the price (the full units seem to start ar $3 retail, and most of the circuitry is already in a USB device)
• Why can’t Microsoft branded products work that easily?
• Bonus issue: A Zune already has 30GB of space on it, but plugging it in gives me the helpful message “This problem was caused by Zune Device, which was created by Microsoft Corporation.” I didn’t even notice the link to the drivers, I just gave up and Google’d them.

So, I repeat, what’s the deal with drivers?

Bountii.com: I don’t make any money from linking to them, but I like the site and John has been known to on occasion let me pick his brain on start-up ideas.