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I've added my vote as 6 - 10 years - but that's really not right. It really depends upon the expected usable lifetime of a product.
A nice example to wait-and-see on is are 'b' wireless products. Sure, it's rather slow, and I upgraded when it took 70 minutes to transfer a file. Up until that point, the most common place I'd observe a speed effect was on the internet (this D-Link pair actually operated at 22 Mbps to one another). The internet was 'fast enough' and almost triple the speed of some low-cost (and thus popular) DSL packages in my area. The point: a lot of users will be making good use of an obsolete product with no reason whatsover to change. Drivers for these should be kept updated for a good long time.
Pretending the manufacturers are really very nice people, they would put their business resources into what is selling, and so, returning to the wireless 'b' example, sales for that are very low (I've seen 'g' routers online for US$9.95 with free shipping). Why create a driver for a product that no-one appears to want? A better way to tell could be, perhaps, how many people downloaded the last driver update?
Even this last item has a cavaet: it is often the case that the update isn't needed until something horrendous, such as VISTA, comes along, and the old driver won't work.
It's a damn hard call when you get down to it.
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein
"How do you find out if you're unwanted if everyone you try to ask tells you to go away?" - Balboos HaGadol
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An extension to that would be that you should, whenever possible, made the hardware interfaces the same or very similar between all similar products. Thus, if at all possible, make it such that it only requires a small change, if any, to the driver to use an A, B, G or N wireless product.
Driver downloads aren't a very good way of seeing how many people will use the hardware with OS n, particularly if OS m had a working driver built into it. This typically is only going to be good for the early portion of the life cycle in the case of OS bundled drivers. Many of the less sophisticated users will continue to use drivers that are even on the CDs unless they are forced to upgrade.
Possibly the easiest way to tell is for the operating system vendors that do automatic updates based on hardware knowledge report back raw numbers and percentages of users with each type of hardware. In the case of Microsoft, if you have a signed driver, this should be a guaranteed service that they provide.
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As customer i would like it for years and year till eternity till i am using that hardware, because i paid it from my money!.. but some time as developer people should upgrade, since it saved us from some extra work 
"Opinions are neither right nor wrong. I cannot change your opinion. I can, however, change what influences your opinion." - David Crow
Never mind - my own stupidity is the source of every "problem" - Mixture
cheers,
Alok Gupta
VC Forum Q&A :- I/ IV
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