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Craig Mundie Blames Microsoft's Product Delays On Cybercrime

Posted by timothy on from the presidential-debate-worthy dept.

whoever57 writes "In an interview in Der Spiegel, Craig Mundie blames Microsoft's failure in mobile on cyber criminals. Noting that Microsoft had a music player before the iPod and a touch device before the iPad, he claims a failure to execute within Microsoft resulted in Microsoft losing its 'leadership.' The reason for the failure to execute, in his words: 'During that time, Windows went through a difficult period where we had to shift a huge amount of our focus to security engineering. The criminal activity in cyberspace was growing dramatically ten years ago, and Microsoft was basically the only company that had enough volume for it to be a target. In part because of that, Windows Vista took a long time to be born.'"

1 of 182 comments (clear)

  1. Obviously the dog ate their decent designs... by tylikcat · · Score: 5, Interesting

    He's discussing the time period right about when I finally bailed on MS. I had been trying to be a security advocate for my group for a couple of years - and was told over and over again that users don't want security, and who cares? (Admittedly, the group I'd worked for before that, which was more server focused, was also more security focused.) ...and then the security initiative began, and while I was cheerfully packing up my office, I suddenly had coworkers stopping by, picking my brain and trying to get me to give them my phone number so I could, continue to work for the company I was so eager to depart from, for free. And, of course, the security infrastructure they produced was incredibly annoying and non helpful for most users. (Somewhere in here my not particularly computer literate mother switched over to linux.)

    Of all the stupid statements I've heard coming out of Microsoft about why they have made lousy products and terrible missteps which were, inaccountably, not embraced by customers, this has got to be the stupidest.

    Mobile? The core problem continues to be that mobile is much more about hardware (which Microsoft itself has finally acknowledged). And even aside from the hardware, more about clean interface design than market dominance.

    What bufoonery.