Microsoft Designed UAC to Annoy Users

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "At the 2008 RSA security conference, Microsoft's David Cross was quoted as saying, 'The reason we put UAC into the platform was 'to annoy users. I'm serious.' The logic behind this statement is that it should encourage application vendors to eliminate as many unnecessary privilege escalations as possible by causing users to complain about all the UAC 'Cancel or Allow' prompts. Of course, they probably didn't expect that Microsoft would instead get most of the complaints for training users to ignore meaningless security warnings."

Comments

At last, a little truth from MS

[Whuffo]

It's about time someone there admitted that they designed that thing to annoy its users. People have been complaining about various annoyances in Windows for years now and even us skeptics don't think that the MS programmers are so stupid that they did it by accident.

It also puts the claim that Vista is "easier and faster" firmly in the BS category. Definitely not faster - and they designed it to be annoying.

Such arrogance; I wonder how much longer they'll be able to play this game...

Re:Of course...

[BobPaul]

On a unix server, each major system process runs under it's own user. There's an apache user, a samba user, an lp user, a mail user, a backup user, a HALdaemon user, a display manager user, a mysql user...