At which point do we no longer expect hifi manufacturers to support old kit with new drivers for new OS? 3 years, 5 years? What's a reasonable expectation?
There's are basically two main ways how to do these things from a marketing standpoint.
a)
You use custom plugs/sockets, custom drivers, custom XYZ, because
- you want to push your customers into buying more of your gear
- you want something that nobody else has
- since you have absolute control, you can rather easily change any piece of code with pretty much no regard for standards or customs
- it's often cheaper - you don't need to comply with anything, it just has to work with your limited set of products
The downside is that you need to extensively support your products.
b)
You use standards and push for including your improvements into a standard form, because
- it has a potential for greater sales - it invites other manufacturers and creates a larger user base for your products
- (in case of an existing standard) allows integration of your products into other setups, resulting in more units sold
- almost zero maintenance (when compared to custom solutions) - others do it for you or it's simply not needed
The downside is that standards tend to be limited in lots of ways and pushing for new revisions may take a lot of resources and several years ... and be unsuccessful in the end. Also some manufacturers think of their drivers (or ie. interfaces) as trade secrets and don't want the competition benefiting from their R&D.
I believe it's the limited user base (audiophiles) that leads manufacturers to (a), along with the intention to generate bias ("foo"). But there are indeed examples of (b), like SPDIF, RCA, ...
There are also examples of companies switching from (a) to (b), like Apple did with ALAC, making it a competition for FLAC, but are rather rare. The lack of support from other manufacturers doesn't really help (Microsoft and unsupported UAC2).
With regard to audio industry, I understand that computer audio is something that's been here only a very small portion of the entire history (since ~1900 ?) and is therefore exhibiting more of (a), very much like the early boom of smartphones and tablets (very volatile hardware and software) in the world of mostly-standard PCs (incl. PC components).
