Annoying Vista feature was deliberate, says Microsoft unit manager
By Arnold Zafra
Microsoft Product Unit Manager, David Cross has said that Microsoft Vista programmers intentionally included User Account Control (UAC) in Vista to “annoy users”. The UAC, when activated, requires users to run Vista in standard user mode and gives them standard user access instead of administrator privileges. It even gets more annoying when users try to install a program and the system would prompt them each time.
News.com quoted Cross during a speaking engagement at the RSA saying that the UAC was put into the Vista to annoy users. Cross elaborates by saying that it has been Microsoft’s strategy to “annoy” users to encourage independent software vendors to make their code more secure .
And as Cross explained, the strategy has been pretty much successful as there are now fewer applications that cause prompts, hence third party applications are getting more secure. Even critics of the UAC have said to have changed their mind .
Security company Kaspersky was among those who criticized UAC when it claimed in March last year that it would render Vista less secure than Windows XP. But at this year’s RSA conference, Jeff Aliber, Kaspersky’s U.S. senior director of product marketing, said that anything that encourages the development of secure apps has to be a good thing.
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