Microsoft: User Account Control is intentionally annoying

User Account Control is considered one of the most annoying ‘security’ related feature in the Windows Vista OS.

Microsoft has now admitted that the feature was designed to be annoying as they wanted software developers to code their applications more securely.

David Cross, a product unit manager at Microsoft spoke about UAC: “The reason we put UAC into the (Vista) platform was to annoy users–I’m serious. Most users had administrator privileges on previous Windows systems and most applications needed administrator privileges to install or run.”

He added: “We needed to change the ecosystem. UAC is changing the ISV ecosystem; applications are getting more secure. This was our target–to change the ecosystem. The fact is that there are fewer applications causing prompts. Eighty percent of the prompts were caused by 10 apps, some from ISVs and some from Microsoft. Sixty-six percent of sessions now have no prompts.”