M i c r o s o f t At RSA 2008 conference in San Francisco, Microsoft’s David Cross a product unit manager admitted that the User Account Control (UAC) was designed deliberately “to annoy users”. He said that the Vista’s User Account Control scheme was built to discourage users from running as an administrator on their computers, which in case of attack can grant hackers deeper access to the system. “We needed to change the ecosystem, and we needed a heavy hammer to do it,” said Cross. It is really surprising that to change a users habit you have to first annoy them, Vista is for Humans right. Vista users are Microsoft customers and normally you try to please customers not annoy them. Giving direct access to administrator account was Microsoft’s mistake and customers have to suffer for that. Mac OS X has root account that is similar to administrator account on Vista but by default no user gets root access, you cannot setup a root account while normal setup of a new computer. The same is true for Unix and Linux, root account are not same as user accounts. Cross also rejects the notion that the users are shutting off UAC, citing Microsoft statistics that 88 percent of Vista users keep it active. The truth is most people don’t even know that they can shut off the UAC. I asked few of my friends who use Vista, and out of 14 only 3 knew that they could shut off UAC that’s just 21%. If you take any desktop operating system except Linux only around 10 to15% are advanced users and when you design a feature that will affect 100% of the users you don’t just consider 10 to 15% advanced users only.
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