At the RSA Conference in San Francisco, David Cross, a product unit manager at Microsoft, recently said the User Access Control feature of Windows Vista was deliberately designed to “annoy users.” User Access Control is the widely-hated feature of Vista that causes a prompt to pop up requiring administrator credentials any time a program does something that requires administrator level access to the PC. David’s explanation is that the purpose of UAC is not so much to change user behavior but instead intended to force application developers to design their applications in ways that do not require unnecessarily high level access to the PC. If they do not, they face complaints from annoyed users that are constantly required to enter administrator passwords or to click on annoying popups any time the application uses this high level access.

Microsoft Windows has long included the ability to run users at lower level, and therefore lower risk, access on their PCs. Unfortunately, many applications are written in a way that requires users to have administrator access, which means that in practice it has always been almost impossible for users to work at lower levels. If they did, they faced frequent application errors and cryptic messages such as the infamous “Access denied.” These applications come from Microsoft itself as well as third party developers (sometimes called ISVs or independent software vendors), and the result is that until Windows Vista, most users were forced to have administrator level access to their PCs, increasing the risk of serious security, virus and spyware problems.

With Windows Vista, Microsoft seems to be acknowledging this fact and trying to use user annoyance as a stick to force application developers to change their development practices. David refers to this as “changing the ISV ecosystem.”

This may be be after-the-fact justification of what many consider to be a lousy feature of Vista, and it also may represent an attempt to displace the burden of forcing change onto users who did not agree to this responsibility. But David’s comments definitely point out a significant long term benefit to Vista’s UAC feature- a benefit that users of all operating systems reap.