Only Handful Of Top Business ISVs Ship Vista Apps

According to a list of compatible and certified Vista applications updated by Microsoft Friday, only 120 of the 879 Vista applications available on the market today are Certified for Vista. That means those applications exploit new features or services in Vista and have passed Microsoft's certification tests.

And only a handful of the 115 or so Vista Certified applications that made their debut in early 2007 -- namely Microsoft Office 2007 and CorelDraw Graphics Suite X3 -- are published by top business ISVs. Microsoft's Office 2007 family alone accounts for about 25 percent of the total number of Certified for Vista applications.

Still, other business ISVs are hard at work. Trend Micro, for example, has released two consumer-oriented security software products that have been Certified for Vista by Microsoft, and its certified corporate products will ship later this year, a Trend Micro spokesman said.

Other leading desktops ISVs -- including Intuit, Symantec and Adobe -- have released patches that make their current applications compatible with Vista, and all pledge to have new versions of their applications Certified for Vista in the near future.

For instance, Intuit's QuickBooks 2007, released in October, is not certified but already exploits important system services in Vista, such as User Account Control (UAC), a security feature that restricts how users can configure -- and inadvertently expose -- their OS to viruses and malware.

Intuit had little choice: QuickBooks was originally built on the administrative rights model, so current versions won't run on Vista without workarounds. An Intuit spokesman said QuickBooks 2007 does not require any elevated privileges and runs easily on Vista once installed.

Trend Micro's Antivirus 2007 and Internet Security Suite 2007 also exploit Vista's User Account Protection, as well as the operating system's new driver signing model, said one company executive. And those are not meaningless check-list items, the company maintains.

"We modified our installer so it works. Yes, there are other applications that are compatible with Vista, but their installers won't obey the way UAC works. So some won't install correctly or may be installed in inappropriate places or won't uninstall correctly," said Carol Carpenter, vice president of marketing at Trend Micro. "

Trend Micro also ensured its kernel drivers were ready for Vista, a new requirement for certification that has a real-world benefit, Carpenter added. "We rewrote our firewall drivers, and [because of this] Vista won't pop up messages to end users," she said.

Getting certification is a "rigorous" process and requires an application to pass more than 30 test-case scenarios, but it's worth the effort, Carpenter said.

"Why not give the customer a quick shortcut? I'm surprised the other folks didn't do it, considering the importance of security software," she added.

Industry observers say it's not unusual for new business applications to lag behind consumer ones because businesses upgrade to new operating systems slower than the mass market does. Still, some Microsoft partners are concerned that so few Vista business applications are on the market, given Microsoft's concerted efforts over the five-year development cycle to entice developers to Vista with its WinFX model.

"I'd have thought that with so many delays and such an incredibly long development cycle that they would have had their ISVs and OEMs in a higher state of readiness for launch than is apparently the case. The drivers, utilities and applications to support -- much less leverage -- Vista simply aren't there and aren't really very close to being there," said Richard Warren, chief technology and marketing officer at Channel Blade Technologies, Virginia Beach, Va.

NEXT: Vista plans of Symantec, Intuit and Adobe