This is ridiculous. We all knew that Vista had problems. I made the mistake of buying it for my latest build and have regretted it numerous times. And one of the most – well, annoying – features of Vista is UAC (User Account Control). And now we know why they did it.
According to News.com, Microsoft group program manager David Cross admitted at a recent conference that “the reason we put UAC into the [Vista] platform was to annoy users – I’m serious.” Somehow they felt that annoying users would cause independent software vendors to write more “secure” code so that it would not trip the UAC prompts.
The second annoyance is that he states some rather slanted statistical information. He states that:
- users don’t blindly accept prompts, according to their information
- only 12% of users actually disable UAC
OK, here’s my rant about this. MS only bases this on OPT-IN information. That means that if you’re smart enough to not opt in (I NEVER opt in – if they want post-production beta testers, they should give them the software free!) then you aren’t telling them that you turned all their garbage off. And to be honest, it’s probably the folks who know better than to opt in that also know to turn UAC off. Not to mention that his statistics don’t tell us anything, because we don’t know how many people opted out! I’m one of the ‘didn’t opt in’ users, and I will tell you this: I blindly accept prompts, and as soon as I figured otu how to turn off UAC, I did. Take that, Mr. Biased Statistics. I bet there’s fifty thousand more just like me.
OK, rant is over. Really, I don’t think it’s just UAC that annoys us – it’s Microsoft. This was in keeping with their track record. But then again, if we all used Ubuntu, I wouldn’t have a job. So thanks for being annoying, and thanks for finally admitting it. But really – don’t use partial stats to try to prove something. That’s worse than just annoying.
I got the tip on to this article from TechRepublic.
Another Signpost on the Information Superhighway 
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