In the battle for taglines and positioning, organizations spend a lot of time wordsmithing a line or a word they like to own. What they never think about are those words they inherit by their own misstatements, product design and great/horrible customer service.

I could think up a few:

• “Touch” – practically owned by iPod, without any assistance of its advertising
• Friendly – Starbucks exudes this, even if you don’t care for the coffee
• Trapped – my take away from a sour experience with Vonage
• Fun – Southwest Airlines, of course
• Un-edgy -the feeling one gets when you see a GoDaddy ad that tries (hard) to be “edgy”

So it was hard to figure the benefit of this Microsoft statement: “The reason we put UAC into the platform was to annoy users. I’m serious.”

It was attributed to David Cross, at a presentation last week. The “UAC’ message in question is one that pops up on Vista, alerting users of a security feature. “We needed to change the ecosystem, and we needed a heavy hammer to do it.”

Aw! How thoughtful: Heavy hammer TLC. Whatever happened to ‘delighting’ customers? Maybe this has been blown out of proportion, but if you Google ‘designed to annoy’ it looks like Microsoft has begun to own that phrase. All that after the effort to own “Wow.”