Microsoft: UAC Designed to Annoy

Microsoft: UAC Designed to Annoy

Friday, April 11, 2008 - by Michael Santo
It's true.  There is at least one feature in Windows Vista that was implemented on time, to spec, and fully functional when Vista was initially released: User Account Control (UAC).

In a Thursday presentation at RSA 2008 in San Francisco, David Cross, a product unit manager at Microsoft who was part of the team that developed UAC, admitted that Microsoft's strategy with UAC was to irritate users and ISVs in order to get them to change their behavior.

"The reason we put UAC into the platform was to annoy users. I'm serious," said Cross.

Well, we have to admit, Microsoft succeeded.  Of course, as Microsoft said, the idea was to get users to change their behavior.  For many, what this did was make them search for "how to disable UAC" on Google.
Via: CRN | News Archive | Tags: Microsoft, Design, os
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Comments

By kid007 on Apr 11, 2008

It makes you wonder, all the little "glitches" or should I say "issues" is because some geek guy wants everyone to have a hard time.

e.g the stupid security center in xp. God how i hate that thing!

By JeffB on Apr 12, 2008

If that was the goal...mission accomplished.

By coolzonestefan on Apr 12, 2008

I guess now that Microsoft will say in the future that Vista was developed to take more system resources on purpose,so people must buy stronger hardware for nothing. 

By willardcw4 on Apr 12, 2008

UAC is annoying.. I hate it... even when I disable it on my vista HD I still get that little pop up ini the bottom right telling me my system is not secure... lame..

By deathman on Apr 14, 2008

JeffB:
If that was the goal...mission accomplished.

No kidding.  Its anyoing as hell but thats why on the first reboot of the OS thats turned OFF.

By Marco C on Apr 12, 2008

You can shut off the alerts in the system tray if you click the dialong box, and then click the "change the way my system alerts me" link.

As for UAC, yes it's annoying. But instead of disabling it, I set it to auto-elevate for admins only. That way, if you have more than one user on a system, it doesn't have to be compeltely disabled and the admin user won't get the annoying prompts.

By pcthuglife on Apr 14, 2008

 

BigWop:
it doesn't have to be compeltely disabled and the admin user won't get the annoying prompts.

I've only used Vista for about 5 minutes (literally), so does this mean that as an admin user you won't receive any prompts? To me that doesn't sound like a good solution either. I've never personally had to deal with UAC, but whenever I hear about it it always makes me question why MS didn't just take a page out of Ubuntu's book and implement sudo-ish system.

By vicaphit on Apr 14, 2008

Turning this off is the way to go.  I am no idiot, and I know that crysis.exe is a trusted application...stop asking me if I want to allow it or not!

By deathman on Apr 15, 2008

Or do you want ot open, install, copy, delete anything

By digitaldd on Apr 16, 2008

Yes they wanted to irritate people so the developers would learn to write proper code. We're still waiting on that.. 

 

instead of users being annoyed by the software developers they're mad at Microsoft go figure. If it was Apple they would be praising Lord Jobs for his forward thinking. 

 


By 3DtoHD on Jul 26, 2008

UAC totally ruined my first windows vista experience. I had to search for countless ebooks on vista to read on "Disabling UAC"

By bob_on_the_cob on Jul 27, 2008

I don't understand why everyone hates UAC so much. In Linux you have to put your password in to install or even update software. Its much more secure. I can finally run without a anti virus. Which I think is more annoy than most viruses or UAC. When vista came out all the anti virus companys were mad that vista stopped there programs from working. IMO its because vista does a lot to stop viruses and they act so much like a virus. Same reason they attack each other if you have 2 installed.

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