Wall Street Slow to Warm to Windows Vista
January 5, 2009
Even before the credit crisis hit, adoption of Microsoft Corp.'s oft-criticized Windows Vista operating system was slow on Wall Street. And with IT budgets tightening across the financial services industry, many firms are not rushing to make the switch.
For many it is not just about the money--there are concerns about Vista's performance when it comes to business productivity applications. According to a testing report issued late last year by Devil Mountain Software, Vista, compared to Windows 2000 and Windows XP, "is easily twice as demanding and requires state-of-the-art hardware in order to perform adequately."
For Hold Brothers On-Line Investment Services, a Jersey City, N.J.-based direct-access trading firm, that was a significant consideration. "In our mission-critical environment, where latency is extremely important, Windows XP Professional was the better choice because it has lower latency than Vista," asserted CEO Greg Hold.
Vista is more "bloated" than Windows XP, said Hold, requiring more memory and processing power. The firm tested Vista, he said, and decided to stay with the older operating system after determining that it runs trading software faster.
Speed, emphasized Hold, is critical for his firm and its clients-mostly day traders. "In trading, milliseconds are extremely important to users, where they might not be important to the general public," he said. "Some kinds of day trading are extremely latency-sensitive--a fast news trader may make millions a year, but one who's just a few milliseconds slower might not make any money at all. That's why we're sensitive to the speed of an operating system, its CPU utilization" and how much memory it takes to run.
Hold Brothers is sticking with XP on the desktops of its 300 employees and contractors, and on the 450 client desktops it controls. "There are only a couple of remote users whose choices we can't control who use Windows Vista," he said. "We will support it, but we really try to push people onto Windows XP Professional. Our relationships with our traders are very strong. They rely on us to make a living, so they are very prone to listen to our software recommendations. We have more input in what operating system our clients would use than a typical brokerage firm."
Hold said his firm hasn't decided whether it will eventually upgrade to Vista--or its successor Windows 7, due in late 2009 or early 2010--or go in a different direction entirely. Hold Brothers is small and agile, he said, and there's plenty of time to decide before Microsoft cuts off support for Windows XP, currently scheduled for 2014.
XP Support
Many firms are opting to hold off on migration, a decision eased by Microsoft's announcement in October that it will continue to offer XP downgrades. Microsoft spokesperson Ted Ladd noted that the Windows Vista Ultimate and Business editions come with downgrade rights, and Microsoft will provide XP disks to manufacturers through July. The hardware companies can continue to install the downgrades past that point, he said, as long as they have enough disks.
In fact, according to Devil Mountain, 35 percent of all PCs sold are downgraded to XP at the point of sale or shortly after being purchased. In the financial services sector in particular, companies looking for increased performance are shifting to the 64-bit version of Windows XP. "If you look at Wall Street types of activities, they can't afford latency, and they can't afford downtime," observed Rod Nelsestuen, research director for financial strategies and IT investments at Needham, Mass.-based TowerGroup.
