Senior Microsoft executive blames cybercriminals for Apple’s smartphone success and Microsoft’s mobile failures

Microsoft’s development director Craig Mundie blames cybercriminals for Apple’s success in the smartphone and tablet market.

In an interview with Der Spiegel, Mundie denies Microsoft has failed to anticipate the emergence of key new technologies, including portable MP3 players, smartphones and tablet devices.

“We had a music player before the iPod. We had a touch device before the iPad. And we were leading in the mobile phone space. So, it wasn’t for a lack of vision or technological foresight that we lost our leadership position. The problem was that we just didn’t give enough reinforcement to those products at the time that we were leading,” Mundie says.

“Unfortunately, the company had some executional missteps, which occurred right at the time when Apple launched the iPhone. With that, we appeared to drop a generation behind.”

When pressed to explain the “executional missteps” that took place at the time of the iPhone launch, Mundie blames cybercriminals.

“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 10 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.”