Analyst: Vista's Security Will Be Pain In The Neck

Jaquith criticized Microsoft's engineers for passing the buck to users under the guise of "choice," rather than making the tough decisions themselves about what should be sensible defaults. "That's a dodge," he said. Putting the burden on users' shoulders will probably do exactly what Microsoft doesn't want: make them ignore the warnings. "Users will be slapping the OK button in those dialogs like they do the snooze button on the alarm clock," Jaquith said. "It's an inelegant copy of [the rights management in] Mac OS X," he added. "On the Mac, users are alerted to important events, like installing software, and the alerts appear for the average user maybe once a week. The difference between being hassled once a week and being hassled every five minutes is dramatic."

UAC will be one of the things users rebel against, Jaquith believes, one of the prime factors in making Vista a "pretty muted adoption" by businesses, and one of the reasons he recommends that enterprises put off Vista until year-after-next.

"Microsoft's challenge with UAC highlight just one of the many problems when migrating to Vista. Enterprises that don't want to be on the bleeding edge should defer upgrades until mid-2008 at the earliest."