Articles by Rob Enderle

What would it take to cause Apple to fail? While Steve Jobs was alive, the prevalent belief was that it would take his removal from the company. That has happened, but Apple's valuation and reserves are higher. Although the foundational element was removed, no one really went after Apple hard until last week, when Google launched a comprehensive ...

Nvidia went to China last week and made a series of interesting announcements having to do with smart cities and autonomous cars. (The video is worth watching.) IBM made an announcement on advancements in tying the Weather Channel to its Watson artificial intelligence engine and targeted marketing. ...

Microsoft has learned a lot of very hard lessons over the last couple of decades, and it continues to surprise and annoy me that other firms seem to have the suicidal tendency to learn the same lessons the hard way. My view is that it is far better and cheaper to avoid the mistakes of others, but firms like Apple, Google and, most recently, Sony ...

It fascinates me that succession from a successful CEO to the chosen successor almost always goes badly. This phenomenon isn't limited to the CEO level -- I've seen highly successful CMOs followed by handpicked successors who also seem to have no clue as to why their predecessor did so well. I think it comes down to a lack of mentoring combined with misconceptions. People with different backgrounds often think their predecessor was lucky rather than smart. ...

Back when the Internet first came to be, there was the typical set of blue sky and lollipop predictions that the result would be more facts, less censorship, more intelligent discourse and less successful manipulation. Being able to converse with each other would lead people to be more honest, and our world increasingly would resemble a utopian i...

The idea that Google might be becoming a national threat is what struck me when I read a Washington Post column by Zephyr Teachout, who currently is an associate professor of law at Fordham University. (As a side note, Teachout would seem to be an ideal name for a teacher.) She makes a compelling argument that Google has reached a point where i...

HP is the new turnaround king -- but is it better than Apple? By "better," I mean a better potential investment. Companies tend to wax and wane. IBM was the king of tech in the 1980s, but in the 1990s it was the king of turnarounds, after almost going under but managing to come back from a negative brand equity. (In a negative equity situation, fo...

It is starting to worry me how little the responses by tech firms will do to fix the problem of extreme views instead of just driving them underground. A good deal of the reason for this is the excessive focus firms now have on how they are run Companies tend to be run tactically, with officials more likely to make decisions that will seem to make ...

It is summer -- a time when a lot of us get to see new movies, many of which totally suck. The folks who made The Emoji Movie apparently were worried about its Rotten Tomatoes score (it had earned a 0 percent rating at one point, based on a scattering of early reviews), so they stopped critics from publishing further reviews until just before previews began running. The result was a great opening day, but attendance fell off sharply because, well, the movie sucked. ...

At a rumored US$1,400 sale price the coming iPhone 8 likely will test just how much people are willing to pay for a new phone -- particularly, how much parents are willing to fork over for their kids. While iPhones once conveyed status and sense of luxury, similar to a brand like Cadillac, pretty much everyone and their brother has iPhones today T...

Facebook knocked it out of the park with its financials last week, and a lot of its success comes from Zuckerberg's unique focus. Unlike other firms that jump from project to project, ranging widely from what makes them money -- like Google -- Facebook stays close to what made it successful. There is no stronger evidence than when you compare the two office projects from Apple and Facebook.

I just finished reading an interesting hard science fiction book called "The Punch Escrow" by Tal M. Klein (a movie is in the works) What makes the difference between hard and soft science fiction is that hard science fiction is based on science, while soft is, let's just say, far more imaginative. To be honest, I enjoy both types, and the soft stu...

HP just took over the PC market lead worldwide. You probably don't get how incredible this is, so here's an analogy: It's as if a crooked referee put a bunch of lead on a racer who already was overweight and shuffled him to the back of the pack, but in the end, the guy finished first. You'd seriously want to look under his T-Shirt to see if you'd find Superman's costume. ...

When we have a hostile country regularly lobbing missiles into the ocean with the stated objective of transforming a U.S. state into a radioactive cloud, we have a problem. One "oops" and we could suddenly become a 49-state nation again -- and that is only if we forget the issues with fallout and the potential for a nuclear winter (granted, that could be good news for the global warming folks). ...

Amazon's significant expansion into yet another market -- this time, grocery stores -- dominated many of my conversations last week. Clearly, Amazon warned us. I've been here before -- you see, back in the 1990s, when Amazon was just books, I was running the company's e-commerce unit. I got into an argument with one of the analysts focused on Amazon, who believed the company wouldn't go beyond books. I argued that the model it was using could -- and would -- expand to other things, but even I wasn't thinking broadly enough. ...

I was at Qualcomm last week, listening to an economist talk about Apple's complaints that Qualcomm had charged Apple too much for access to patents. What I thought was fascinating was that Apple had folks focused on the 5 percent that Qualcomm had charged it instead of on the massive profit that Apple made on each phone. The price of the iPhone 8...

The two mammoth events last week were the Apple developers conference keynote and ex-FBI chief James Comey's appearance at a Senate committee hearing. Now I'm sure a lot of folks didn't have the time to watch both events -- and particularly for the Comey event, I'm sure the coverage has the right and the left believing very different realities. ...

I didn't attend Computex this year, and that was sad for everything but my budget, because there was a ton of cool stuff announced at the show. Dell, HP and Lenovo showed off new designs that were both attractive and compelling. Mixed-reality headsets hit; based on Intel and Microsoft technology, they were far more affordable than the strong virtual reality stuff already in market (and some aren't bad looking). New core wars broke out, as AMD's 16 Core Threadripper was challenged by Intel's 18 core i9.

It is kind of amazing how much advancement is going on in the autonomous car space. A year ago, we were mostly talking about cars that seemed comparatively boring, because they just drove on the surface. How quaint -- how 2016. Now when we mention "boring," we may be talking about Elon Musk's new underground tunneling idea. However, a little co...

Nvidia earlier this month launched a massive new push for intelligent machines, including what is likely the most expensive volume workstation in the world designed for this purpose. IBM, which has a tight relationship with Nvidia, launched a quantum computing processor that has a good chance of massively increasing the speed and intelligence of ...