"The reason we put UAC into the (Vista) platform was to annoy users--I'm serious," said Cross, speaking at the RSA Conference here Thursday. "Most users had administrator privileges on previous Windows systems and most applications needed administrator privileges to install or run."
Cross claimed that annoying users had been part of a Microsoft strategy to force independent software vendors (ISVs) to make their code more secure, as insecure code would trigger a prompt, discouraging users from executing the code.
