Now this is what I call product support!

It's absolutely remarkable how efficient the technical support team at some companies are.

If anyone here is familiar with the Canon Pixma series of printers, then you would know first hand that this range of printers is natively supported in Vista. By this I mean all you need do is plug it in, and a few seconds later, Vista uses it's own certified driver, and you can print.

I did however, run into a little glitch earlier this afternoon.

One of my favourite features of the Canon Pixma IP3000 was the Easy-PhotoPrint software that came bundled with it. To clear the air, this bit of software is the one rare instance where I've actually enjoyed using bundled software!

But when I started using Vista nearly a year ago, I couldn't use the Easy-PhotoPrint that is on the driver CD, because it was for XP, and it would not install to Vista x64. This wasn't so much of a problem, as I rarely required a straight-up photo prints, so I ignored it, and continued to use CorelDraw X3 for my design and printing tasks.

But this afternoon, I had to get a driver for a customer, and I noticed that Canon had a Vista compatible version of Easy-PhotoPrint available for download. So I downloaded it, and installed flawlessly, except that for some obscure reason, it didn't want to see my printer.

So I contacted Canon support via the regular channels with an email request. An would you believe that not less than a hour later, they provided me with the driver extension that I needed to allow Easy-PhotoPrint to use the Vista supplied driver.

This is abolutely the best product support I've experienced in a long time. No see-saw emailing, or obscure instructions, or a "sorry we don't support it". I asked a question, and they responded with the answer I was looking. Fantastic! A lot of companies (who shall remain nameless) can learn from this, as this level of care is exactly how customer loyalty is built and maintained.