Craig Mundie Blames Microsoft's Product Delays On Cybercrime

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.'"

Comments

Were MS Assets Available?

[BoRegardless]

If MS had wanted to start a new division for mobile devices, it had the cash to do it. Mundie's excuse doesn't cut it.

If what he is saying is that he and Balmer are so much of a micromanagement team that they couldn't handle one more project and still tell everyone what to do, I can buy that as an excuse.

Re:Were MS Assets Available?

[MysteriousPreacher]

I feel for Mundie. My construction business went through something similar. After many happy years of designing and building sub-standard residential properties, we were caught off-guard when people began to exploit the tendency of our houses to catch fire, explode, and be easily burgled.

As the largest builder of houses, we were a common target. We lost our lead in commercial buildings because we had to devote a lot of resources to learning how to build houses that lasted more than a few days.

it's easy in hindsight to say that electrical insulation is useful, or that gas pipes should not leak, or that front doors be made of something more sturdy than cardboard. Back then we had no reason to assume that anything of those things were ever going to be important, and I assume everyone built houses that were prone to sudden annihilation.

We're not entirely blameless. This would never have happened if people had kept naked flames at least 30ft away from the houses. The cardboard doors on the houses not at the time exploding and/or burning, was only an issue because criminals were trying to burgle houses.

Never designed to be network-aware

[jabberw0k]

Windows (and MS-DOS before it) was not originally designed to be network-aware, much less network-safe. MS-DOS was a thinly disguised clone of Digital Research's CP/M, circa 1974. CP/M, as a personal computer operating system, was specifically designed not to have any sort of security, versus what was seen as the draconian measures taken by "mainframe mentality" operating systems like UNIX (from Bell Labs, 1969).

It was no surprise to anyone that an operating system that treats all programs and operations as fully privileged, when connected to a global network, treats everyone in the world as a sysadmin. Microsoft's campaign, then, was to somehow graft basic security features into an o/s that never had them, without horribly breaking every existing application.

That they succeeded even a little is a triumph of engineering.

But they would have saved everyone, including themselves, a huge amount of time and money by using something more UNIX-like as the design basis of Windows NT in the early 1990s. Apple learned that lesson with OS/X. Microsoft had Xenix years before, but threw it away. We, and Microsoft, are still suffering the consequences.

As so-called "smart" phonecomputers and tablets further fragment the marketplace, it won't be the PC that "goes away" but, at long, last, Windows and the CP/M heritage. The UNIX way wins at last... Huzzah!

Re:Never designed to be network-aware

[Waffle Iron]

Windows (and MS-DOS before it) was not originally designed to be network-aware

And how is that relevant? ... The base of the Windows you are running today was designed to be similar to VMS from DEC, an operating system that actually had the "mainframe mentality".

It's relevant because for many years they shipped their OSes configured "out of the box" to bypass or hobble much of that wonderful-on-paper NT security model. This was so they could preserve the nonrestrictive DOS/Win95 the user experience that people were so used to. The security technology might as well not be there if nobody actually uses it.

This problem was compounded by a lack of quality control on much of the system code outside of the kernel itself. Remember when the half life to 0wnage of a fresh XP box connected to the Internet was measured in minutes?

Obviously the dog ate their decent designs...

[tylikcat]

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.

Re:Cyber criminals

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Hah, wait till Chair Man comes to the rescue! (I know the public identity to his secret one, but I won't tell!)

Well duh

[Solandri]

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.

You took an OS which effectively ran with superuser privileges (DOS) all the time, and added a graphical shell on top of it (Win95, Win98). You then tried to switch it to a more secure user / superuser model, but you made it so inconvenient that it was easier for everyone to just run as superuser all the time (NT, 2k, XP). Finally you started trying to enforce running as a regular user except when needed (Vista). But the industry had had a decade to acclimate to running as superuser, so you were met with so much resistance you had to scale it back (7). Of course you're going to have a huge security problem.

You should've just bitten the bullet and enforced the user / superuser paradigm as early as you could have. i.e. Back when the Internet became big, around when Windows 95 came out, you should've realized the future was for all computers to be networked, and that user vs. admin privileges were going to become very, very important. But no, you took the easy way out and stuck with the one-computer one-user model, and you've been paying the price for it for the last decade and half. You made your own bed; it's disingenuous to now blame someone else for having to lie in it.

Part of being a good leader (of a group, country, market, whatever) is to foresee and recognize what's going to become important or a problem in the future, long before your followers do. A good example is what the NSA did with DES. They had done enough secret research into DES that they knew of a vulnerability; and when DES was proposed as a standard they made some secret changes to it which eliminated that vulnerability before the public was even aware of it. Your job as a leader is to act on that foresight, even if your followers can't see what you see and complain about it. If you can't do that, you just aren't cut out to be a leader.