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An Equally Good Explanation for the Rest of Vista as Well…

April 11, 2008 at 1:29 pm PT

As a company, and as individuals, Microsoft (MSFT) really does value honesty and openness. Consider this: In a presentation yesterday at RSA 2008 in San Francisco, David Cross, a product unit manager at Microsoft, explained the design concept behind the User Account Control in Windows Vista in the following very honest, very open way:

The reason we put UAC into the platform was to annoy users. I’m serious.”

A true credit to the company, that Cross.

If that truly is the reason for UAC’s inclusion in Vista, it’s served its purpose well.

Tagged with: John Paczkowski, Microsoft, platform, RSA, User Account Control, Vista

comments so far. Add yours.

http://dailycrapola.blogspot.com/ Ed Chavez

“Elitist” seems to be the word of the week so I’ll apply it to those who “hate” this feature.

You can pretty much “see” that so-called “power users” hate this the most. That maybe true, but the “elitist” in them would like you to believe that everyone is a power user. Hmmm…

And then there are those that wage the usual “religious” OS wars. Well, it does take a power user to make most of those other OSes to work anyway, so I guess their annoyance is probably more valid.

But to the “usual user” (not casual – are there truly “casual users” anymore?), while it may be good for the ego to think that you’re a power user, the suggestion (and link) to disabling this feature permanently is probably the perfect example of why you’re not (a power user).

My reservation on VISTA is more on resource requirements, and I think that’s one area where annoyance is valid. But UAC? Quoting one poster (not verbatim):

“Being annoyed at this, is just like beying annoyed at a firewall prompting (or blocking) access.”

So to all those “annoyed” people, yeah, go ahead and turn your firewalls (or IPSes) off too. Then let’s talk about your happy surfing experience after a few days….