History 6 years of installing drivers

Hello, Habrahabr!

This is our first post on the resource, so please do not judge strictly and listen to the story we want to tell.

Back in 2008, the creator of DriverPack Arthur Kuzyakov, trying to reduce his own time working with a computer at Computer Assistance, which installs operating systems, configures and maintains computers, wrote the first version of the program.
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The reasons for which he took on this are prosaic: for people who are confronted with the large size of computer parks, that is, system administrators, setup wizards, and all others involved; A huge amount of time is spent on installing and updating drivers. Time comparable to installing the operating system itself.

And although the installation of the OS is automated, and the programs can be installed remotely or as a package, the ability to automatically scan the hardware and install the necessary drivers from a large archive (without knowing which hardware you should encounter with the hardware) simply wasn't there.

But I wanted to have a universal tool that can be worn on a disk or flash drive to automate this task.

That is why the first versions of the program weighed a few gigabytes, and were distributed (the full versions are still distributed) on DVDs and via torrent trackers. Since the product is free, we are happy about it.



We continue: open-source Arthur, on the one hand, ensured the popularity of his program at first without any advertising, and on the other, provoked the emergence of a number of competitors who distributed his work for the money they appropriated to themselves.

In 2009, after the first million installations, a program site was created, a logo was drawn and the community began to develop. Most users prefer the original and free product to numerous clones.

Anyone will say - to spread this on a physical medium is pointless.
But paradoxically, the first 1300 DVDs that Arthur offered users to buy 300 rubles each with delivery were scattered in less than 1 month. Our reality, in which the distance from Moscow to Vladivostok is greater than that to New York, there are places where traffic was so expensive that DriverPack was a saving circle for many specialists.

Then it became clear that the program is relevant for ordinary users.
A curious fact: after the release of Windows Vista, many hardware manufacturers for computers and laptops, primarily OEMs, stopped uploading and updating driver versions for Windows XP on their websites. This was the starting point for driverpack.

In 2010, having already 10,000,000 installations of the program, an English-language website was created, and the program itself was translated into 15 languages.
Since 2011, DriverPack has already become the core of the ecosystem of services, which we will discuss in future publications.

A little later, the following happened:


Since Arthur was initially not looking for an investor, but a mentor, a whole line of people formed to him, who wanted to get a share giving only money, but not offering ways to develop a product that had already been transformed into a company with several employees.

I had to persuade my father, a radio technician by training, to head his Computer Assistance company, from which it all began, in order to give all the power and time to DriverPack.

Finally, a catalog of laptops and drivers for them, organized automatically, became another breakthrough moment.
Since the program is scanned by the standard Microsoft process, and sends this data to the server for selecting drivers, Arthur initially had the opportunity to collect anonymous statistics about the equipment installed in any laptop model. It only remained to collect this together and provide the user in a convenient way, which was done.

Having the need to somehow increase their own profits, the creator did not embed advertising in the application, but tried to find partners in the Russian market. Yandex, whose representatives called themselves after fasting on Habré, were among the first. Therefore, for DriverPack, this place is, of course, special.

Today, each release is sent to Kaspersky Lab, where it is checked, so our users can be sure that the program is safe. Well, to what our success today, we will dedicate our next post.

Did you use driverpack? Your opinion is important to us.