Articles by Rob Enderle

I spent Thursday of last week at an event put on by A&R Edelman talking about the importance of trust, where they discussed their findings on a survey of around 4,000 companies. They concluded that that trust is directly tied to the market recovery and that tech companies were the most trusted In addition, in Barcelona, what may be the birth of the...

It's hard not to look at the stimulus package announced last week and not be disappointed. About 35 percent of it is tax cuts that will be so small for the majority of us that it simply won't have an impact other than to put the country in deeper debt Intel announced its own stimulus package in the form of a massive investment in new fabs; the diff...

Last week was an unusually interesting week. We started the week with one of the biggest 3-D attempts ever -- both Super Bowl ads and an episode of "Chuck," both of which showcased the problems with 3-D At the same time, I was playing "World of Warcraft" in 3-D, and that was working just fine. Toward the end of the week, HP Labs showcased a way to ...

We actually are seeing a large number of turnarounds going on in the industry, and all are overshadowed by President Obama's effort to turn around the country. Last week's vote on the stimulus package would indicate things aren't going well for Obama because, while it passed, all Republicans voted against it -- but it showcases the exact kind of problem Howard Stringer is having at Sony...

Windows 7 is coming, and even major Apple fans like Walt Mossberg are saying some rather surprising things about it. With the layoffs and financial results that Microsoft announced last week, you have to wonder whether it will be enough to light a fire under the market like Windows 95 did. A lot has changed, and I'm beginning to wonder if, like it was in the '80s, the market is getting ready to move to something else...

Both Steve Jobs and Apple are unique -- well, almost -- in the technology market. Most companies spend their money on lots of product choices and hope to hit a sweet spot for a customer; Apple spends its money on marketing and design and drives customers to the sweet spot it creates. Most CEOs focus on financial performance, investors and big customers; Steve Jobs focuses on design, product presentation and driving employees and suppliers like cattle, leaving the traditional CEO roles largely to others. Apple and Steve Jobs are deeply intertwined, with no evidence of any real life outside or after Apple for Jobs, and no real successor to Jobs for Apple...

This was the first chance since Steve Jobs returned to Apple that Microsoft had to slam-dunk Apple. The biggest thing at Macworld was Tony Bennett. Windows 7 was releasing in Beta and reports have been glowing, with a number of the folks I travel with actually living on the pre-beta code and raving about it so this should have been like shooting ducks in a barrel. Palm was bringing out a new phone and a lot of folks thought they were simply done and not worth seeing, good lesson in the dangers of preconceptions here. Cisco was going to take a run at the gold standard in home music -- Sonos -- and the PC vendors went to war.

Well, this is CES week, and I am eagerly waiting to fly to Las Vegas, participate in the Tiger Build Your Own PC race, and spend the following three weeks relearning how to walk. This year should be interesting because I'm getting weekly notices that the hotels are lowering room rates, and one of the vendors is letting me use one of its pre-paid rooms for free...

People don't like to change; particularly as we get older, we take comfort in the status quo and start avoiding things that are new and different. As we get older we gain more power and this generally places the most conservative people in positions of authority. Let's look at four companies this week and how they are likely to change in 2009/2010...

This year was likely the last of an era where vendors could afford to shotgun out products and services and hope that buyers would take them. 2009 will be much harsher on practices like this, as funding will be very short and misses will be career limiting, severely for some. Looking back, there were a number of products we covered that stood out as being amazing, and one I can't picture living without at the moment.

The new president-elect for the U.S. isn't even in office yet and he is already wrapped in scandal. Fortunately we can live with this one as it had to do with whether he carried a Zune or an iPod, but given some were calling this -- and I'm not kidding -- "Zunegate," I thought the event was interesting But it did showcase how closely we are watchin...

The economic pressure continues to increase and there is a reasonably good chance that we'll be down to one large car company in the U.S. by this time next year -- Ford, which appears to be the only one that isn't saying it won't survive without a massive cash infusion from the U.S. government In the PC space, there are three companies being watche...

One of the first jobs I ever held was as an auto mechanic and have had a passion for cars that predates my passion for technology. Watching the U.S. auto industry make mistake after mistake until it was nearly out of business has been particularly painful for any of us who love both cars and our country. I'm in the market for a new car myself, and there isn't a single one from any of the Big Three that excites me at the moment. Based on how well the Japanese and Korean car companies are doing, I'm guessing I'm not alone...

It was an interesting week last week, made even more interesting by a bunch of news services calling our U.S. president-elect either the new Hitler or a Marxist, suggesting these folks got some really bad eggnog. This should be filed under NOT HELPING. While tempted, I'll avoid further mentioning that insanity in the hope they sober up and instead focus on some interesting tech moves...

Over the last several days I've attended two conferences that are focused on predicting and changing the future of technology and technology companies. The first was put on by Digital River, a firm that specializes in setting up or improving profitable online stores like Apple and Dell have, and we were focused on strategies for increasing company revenues and profits in these troubling times.

I am breathing a long sigh of relief this week now that the election is over and it appears, for once, the most qualified candidate actually got the job. This seems to rarely happen, and my only remaining hope is Apple gets a clue from McCain's loss and switches off the negative advertising and instead works on improving its own products Speaking o...

In the current US election, I would argue the winner actually will benefit from the excessive negative campaigning done by his opponent, who sacrificed trust and in many cases implied the U.S. voter was too stupid to go to the Web and look things up The well-executed Mac vs. Windows ads, while at least funny and entertaining, drifted from solid hit...

I can remember the day, way back, when the U.S. was the most important market in the world and companies from all over fought to build a presence and establish themselves here. Our politicians have creatively fixed that advantage, and now China is the place to be. According to projections, the Chinese market will eclipse the U.S. and the European markets combined by 2015 -- and that has a lot of folks fighting to become the major technology player in that future China...

I was tempted to pick FUD as a topic and talk about how McCain's use of it killed his campaign. However, last week we had two major launches, one of which was Apple releasing its latest notebooks and embracing graphics as a defining feature but avoiding Blu-ray and HDMI Apple works to drive the markets it occupies and is successful more often than...

Crisis breeds change, and given people don't like change, this can result in market shifts in months that otherwise might have taken years. This week, three things happened that I can tie back into this theme. AMD, driven by crisis, provided a strong example of how the U.S. could address its financial crisis by changing what was a going-out-of-business disadvantage into a potential competitive advantage.