In response to reports that some Mac users are apparently getting “blue screens” in the course of upgrading to Leopard, John Gruber leaps to Apple’s defense:

The most common route is Logitech Control Center, the mouse “driver” software from Logitech. “Driver” in quotes because it’s utterly absurd and completely irresponsible for Logitech to base their mouse software on a completely and utterly unsupported-by-Apple system software modification.

Well, he’s right, of course.

But on the other hand, for a hardware company to buy and use off-the-shelf software, instead of writing their own, borders on genius. Hardware companies — if I may paint with a broad brush — tend to think of drivers and related software as an afterthought. When the electrical engineers are done sorting out the voltages and resistances with the mechanical engineers, they’re assigned the task of putting together some application-level software for end-users. The result is utterly predictable. Consider for a moment how crappy the software is that comes with a digital camera or printer. (Or — especially — a scanner.)

So the surprising thing to me isn’t that Logitech’s software does something that makes the system unstable or even brings it to a halt. To me, the surprising thing is that they got 3rd-party software developers to do that for them, instead of having some EE’s code it up in-house.