Advisers thinking about treating themselves this holiday season to new office PCs running Microsoft Vista should think twice: Only a tiny fraction of an adviser's core professional software is likely to be Microsoft Vista-compatible.
In fact, only a fraction of all business software is compatible even though the software was rolled out six months ago.
"It will probably be quite a while before we'll be recommending that our advisers migrate over to Vista," said Darren Tedesco, director of business systems & IT strategy at large independent broker-dealer Commonwealth Financial Network in Boston.
"We've been recommending they stay with XP," he said.
Richard J. Krasney, a certified financial planner and investment adviser with Krasney Financial LLC in Mendham, N.J., recently faced this issue head-on. The hard drive in his four-year-old desktop PC died and he began researching what to do next. He had regularly backed up all his data to the online service offered by Iron Mountain Inc. of Boston.
So far, so good.
"I decided to treat myself and got a great deal on a Gateway laptop at Best Buy," said Mr. Krasney.
That included a Gateway Ultrabright 17-inch anti-reflective screen, 2GB of system memory and the fast Intel Pentium 4 Dual Core processor. He decided to buy the Microsoft Office 2007 Professional software in addition to the Microsoft Vista operating system already included in the package. That nearly doubled the price of the computer, from $599 to more than $1,000.
"You'd think I was happy as a clam, right? Not so fast," he said, "First, Iron Mountain told me they were not Vista-compatible [and that] I'd have to use my other desktop XP computer — the one that died, mind you — to salvage what was on Iron Mountain's site."
On top of that, the company wasn't offering any backup options for Vista PCs, so Mr. Krasney was forced to drop the service in favor of Washington-based Backup.com.
His travails didn't end there. He was also stymied by a lack of synchronization support between his Palm Treo 650 mobile phone and the new version of Microsoft Outlook in Office 2007.
SECURITY LEVELS' MISMATCH
Stevan Vidich, Microsoft's industry architect for capital markets, part of the Redmond, Wash.-based company's financial services group, said that user-account controls are to blame for many compatibility issues.
"Many vendors still count on the openness built into the account privileges of Windows XP. With that operating system, everyone could have administrator privileges, and that could wreak havoc if [computer viruses or other] malware got in. By default with Vista, privileges are limited," Mr. Vidich said.
In simplified terms, this comes down to a fundamental mismatch in security levels between the two operating systems, something that many third-party software developers — no matter what the industry they are in — have yet to master.
"We've seen that once these things are taken into account by software vendors during their development or upgrade process, it greatly reduces the instance of software not working with Vista," he said.
Mr. Vidich said that he works with many Wall Street securities and brokerage firms, as well as independent software vendors. Rolling out applications in large organizations simply takes time, he said.
"Some very large organizations are adopting Vista very rapidly," he said, citing Citigroup Inc. of New York and its planned rollout of Vista to all its 325,000 PC users. Similarly, many advisers using online platforms will find that those systems are fully compatible with the version of Microsoft Internet Explorer that's bundled with Vista.
One example of a platform that's already been touted by its provider as fully Vista-compliant is PortfolioCenter, offered by Schwab Performance Technologies Inc. of Raleigh, N.C.
UNDER THE RADAR
According to the latest data from website analytics and statistics provider NetApplications.com, head-quartered in Aliso Viejo, Calif., the current market share of Vista is 9.19% of the U.S. operating-system market, up from 7.91% in October. Microsoft XP's share has dipped to 78.37% from a little over 79% at the start of the fourth quarter. Macintosh, which offers computers that run on a Macintosh operating system and newer Macintosh computers that use the Intel chipset and are also capable of running Windows, has a 6.81% market share. Windows 2000 has a 2.97% share.
If holiday shoppers go on a year-end PC buying spree, these numbers could jibe with Microsoft's expectations of capturing a 15% market share with Vista.
None of the dozen analysts contacted for this story were specifically tracking Vista adoption within the financial services market. Several said it was too much of a niche issue to track.
"Desktop upgrades to Vista are not even on the radar [for chief information officers]," said Adam D. Honor, a senior analyst with Boston-based Aite Group LLC. "Systems integration, workflow tools, market data processing, trading settlement [and] spending on all these issues will trump anything related to the desktop."
Microsoft's Mr. Vidich said that Mr. Krasney's experiences might be similar to those of many independent advisers making purchases on their own, but that many others associated with brokerages or other large, third-party service and application providers probably were advised on whether or not to proceed.
"I don't dispute what [you've been hearing from advisers]. The best that I can say is that we work very hard with partners and software developers, and make compatibility tools for software vendors freely available to them," he said.
As if the company had foreseen the delays it would experience with the release of Vista, Microsoft in 2004 extended the support timeline for all its products from seven years (five of standard support and two of extended support) to 10 years (five years each of standard and ex-tended support). Given the rollout of the second and final service pack for Windows XP in April 2004, this means that users of that pack will have support until April 2014.
Mr. Vidich and CommonWealth's Mr. Tedesco both emphasized that advisers considering purchase of a Vista system should make a list of their core — if not all of their — software, and then check each software maker's website to see if it is compatible with the Vista operating system. If one does not find explicit information about compatibility, it is worth a call to the vendor, they added.
Davis D. Janowski can be reached at djanowski@crain.com.
In addition to consulting the websites of their application and software providers, advisers and their software developers can turn to the following Microsoft pages and tools to sort out issues of software compatibility.
Application Compatibility Cookbook:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb757005.aspx
Application Compatibility Toolkit:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsvista/aa905102.aspx
Escalating compatibility issues to Microsoft:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsvista/bb727208.aspx
Independent Software Vendor Readiness Tests:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsvista/bb687993.aspx
Overview page for Microsoft Windows Vista “certified for” and “works with” logos
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/933305
List of applications certified for Windows Vista
https://winqual.microsoft.com/member/softwarelogo/certifiedlist.aspx
List of applications designated as “Works with Windows Vista”
https://winqual.microsoft.com/member/softwarelogo/workswithlist.aspx
