Charging for drivers and upgrades

A little storm was whipped at ZDNet about Creative charging for ALchemy software. This raises the question of when is it fair for a vendor to charge for an upgrade.

The initial ZDNet report was that Creative were charging for software to run their popular Audigy sound cards. Ed Bott's later report clarified the charge is actually for the ALchemy software which replaces features Microsoft have dropped with Vista, the drivers themselves are free but don't have the advanced gaming features.

To be fair to Creative, they are at least supporting their product. Plenty of other hardware vendors have told customers that it's tough luck, they won't support Vista for relatively new equipment.

I'm on Creative's side on this. Creative have obviously spent money and time developing the software so it runs on Vista. As a businessman I think they deserve being paid, although as a customer I wouldn't be happy.

The real problem for vendors is that with dramatically reduced margins, it's difficult to provide service like this. You certainly can't afford to build it into the profit from selling the original card.

This is the downside of cheap hardware and software. The cheaper it gets, the harder it is for vendors to supply after sales service.

One of the biggest challenges for the IT industry is educating customers that you can have a cheap product, but after sales support is going to cost.

Of course you don't have to do this if you don't compete at the cheap end of the market. But that's another issue.