> It's more of an advertisement for their driver "certification" > process. It's a message to driver developers: "pay us a boatload of > money for your driver to be certified, or we'll make it look like your > software is shonky so people will go buy hardware from someone else".
Personally, I suspect something slightly more malevolent: content protection. I will *not* be surprised if, sometime in the future, you will not be able to use copy-protected content (you know, all that protected WMA stuff, HD-DVD, etc) unless all the drivers in the driver chain are "certified". Why? So it is much harder to make a driver that spits out the raw unencrypted (or whatever) content. - Guy