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Microsoft has been fairly late to enter the smartphone market, having been able to gain some foothold only recently with Nokia’s Lumia. In a recent interview, a Microsoft executive blamed this delay on cyber crime, saying that had cyber crime not spiked a few years ago, Microsoft may have led with the smartphone banner.

These opinions were cited by the development director at Microsoft, Craig Mundie. Mundie was fairly spoton when he said that whereas the likes of Apple were busy creating a smartphone a few years ago, Microsoft was trying to tackle the cyber criminals.

This was because Microsoft already had a wildly popular product, Windows, out in the open and it had to shoulder the responsibility of saving its users from the cyber criminals who were starting to become active back then.

In the interview, Mundie said, “During [the time that Apple was building the iPhone], 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.”

Mundie went on to state that Apple’s iPhone or iPad were no novel concepts and that Microsoft had already created and tested such products. However, due to the other engagements of the company, it couldn’t dedicate enough resources to these products.

According to him, “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. 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.”

Source: Spiegel
Courtesy: BGR

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