Microsoft designs UAC to annoy you

UAC is among the most hated feature of Windows Vista. At recent RSA security conference 2008 in San Francisco, Microsoft's David Cross said: "The reason we put UAC into the platform was to annoy users. I'm serious".

In fact, the logic is that the annoyance 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.

Microsoft's strategy is actually quite successful. Personally, I never care about security privilege when developing software before this UAC stuff. Since the release of UAC, I noticed my applications will crash and throwing ugly error messages becuse of this UAC thing. As a result, I have to change my software development behaviour to avoid the UAC prompts.

However, Microsoft's strategy comes at the expense of user experience, and Microsoft get most of the complaints for the meaningless security warnings. As stated by Ars Technica, one of the most popular post-Vista install activities is disabling UAC. Yeah, it is true, I disabled UAC after using Vista for 3 days.

Source: Ars Technica