Articles by Rob Enderle

As a guest of AMD, I went to Indianapolis to watch the top Ferrari team once again whomp the other nine teams in what remains one of the most expensive sports in the world. This racing team has been winning for so long and is so dominant in this sport that I often wonder why anyone watches these races anymore. The outcome often seems preordained Th...

Every few years we have to take a deep breath and get ready for change, especially now as the personal computer industry will be adjusting to accommodate the technology changes that have defined it for the last several decades. We are entering another period of massive changes, which will be hitting several technologies and platforms with broad im...

Last week I attended the HP analyst conference and I suddenly realized that the dynamic surrounding the mess we currently have with consumer electronics has changed. For some time I've been concerned that we have been focusing, as an industry, way too much on technologies that engineers care about and not enough on the wants and needs of real peop...

I'm currently reading a science fiction book that refers to Bill Gates, and I was watching a movie recently in which one of the streets is named Microsoft Way, which happened to be on the moon. Clearly, Microsoft permeates much of what we do in tech, so it's no wonder that every time there is a change, we focus on the impact on Microsoft and attempt to forecast a demise that has been overhyped and simply not forthcoming...

Microsoft has three major annual conferences: the Professional Developer's Conference (PDC), Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) and TechEd. Although each conference is important and has set record attendance in the past couple of years, providing a solid counterpoint to the view that Microsoft is in decline, TechEd is about users of Microsoft's technology while the other two shows are focused on those that sell the technology. At TechEd, you'll find the technology buyers. Microsoft touches more of those buyers than any other single vendor.

I was chatting with a journalist a couple of days ago to help with background on a story on Microsoft designed to debunk one of the most common misconceptions surrounding the company. I started to realize there were a lot of them -- some I actually held myself -- that either were no longer true or never had been This came to a head the other day wh...

A while back, I wrote a column on how Microsoft had passed Nintendo to become number two in the gaming scene [Rob Enderle, "Xbox v. PlayStation: Microsoft Throws Down the Gauntlet," TechNewsWorld, March 29, 2004]. In that column, I covered what Microsoft was doing to chase the clearly dominant player in the console-gaming market. That dominant player was and is Sony. In handheld gaming, the landscape is very different.

While it will be some time before Linux is really much of a threat to Microsoft's installed base or Microsoft to Linux's, the battle for the consumer and corporate desktop was actually joined some time ago. Both sides are working furiously to derail the other With both the WinHEC and TechEd conferences this month covering Longhorn, the next version...

We may be watching the demise of Apple as a PC company and its rebirth as a cross-platform multimedia company. This has been going on for some time, but it just became obvious to me when I had a chance to review Apple's latest financials. The PC market grew at a good rate -- at least compared with previous years -- with 16 to 20 percent growth, depending on who provided the numbers. Apple grew its PC business at a near-flat 5 percent and lost share, again.

SCO has just over US$60 million in resources to sustain it while it fights IBM in what clearly is one of the most volatile wars in the history of technology. What has been very interesting is that SCO publicly has been given almost no chance of winning, while privately the company has convinced several folks, including me, that it has a strong chance.

A few years ago, the History Channel had a program that covered great military disasters. One was the on the French Maginot Line. This was a line of supposedly impregnable forts that were put in place to prevent invasion by Germany after World War I. This solution was monumental in cost and it failed miserably because the analysis that created it ...

The topic of IT scams, both those done to IT folks and those done by IT folks, has come up several times in conversations over the last month. Since internal audit organizations are receiving massive increases in funding, staffing and provisioning, I thought it would be good to review some of the more interesting IT scams so that you too will know some of the things that likely will be found in a large number of firms.

I have to admit a certain bias for personal robotics. Nearly two decades ago, when I was first married, our ring bearer was a robot, and one right off the production line. Even today, he remains with us in his little home in the corner of our cellar, where you can almost hear him mumble: "Honestly, I didn't order that extra case of champagne; it was your old boss. Lemme out." We remember him fondly for his ability to entertain children and trip the older guests...

At the Game Developers Conference (GDC) last week, Microsoft raised the bar on what has become one of the more interesting battles in the industry. Actually, it would be more accurate to say Microsoft has taken the gloves off and now -- really -- is going after the entertainment segment The Xbox and MSN groups at Microsoft have been more like indep...

Last week I flew down to the launch of the new Starbucks music service and got far more out of the event than a cup of coffee and some free music. I got a sense of why Starbucks is as successful as it is and why HP is suddenly emerging as the company to beat in the technology space. I also went away with a better understanding of the future of music services.

As I write this column, I am at an amazing conference session full of attendees who are influencing the world. Ranging from marketing executives to media consultants to top journalists, these people have influence over the perceptions that shape our reality. In this session, every person in the room is electronically connected to the network and t...

I sit on a lot of PC company advisory boards, and, while this may surprise you, I actually point out Apple's competitive advantages on a regular basis. The problem for me is Apple's market share, which is at a tiny and stable 2.6 percent of the PC marketplace Don't get me wrong, Dell is where Apple once was at the top of the PC stack. But Dell got ...

Last week at the RSA conference in soggy California, Microsoft presented the most comprehensive plan I've ever seen to address a security problem. Granted, they currently have massive exposure, but it caused me to wonder what would happen if everyone followed their lead and focused on the human aspects of the problem rather than just the technical ...

When I first moved into management, I was a big fan of outsourcing. It has huge advantages if your eye is on the next higher job. It removes -- almost immediately -- the vast complexities of managing lots of people, and in most countries that includes racial issues, sexual issues, benefits, unions, taxes and moods. It also seems to make budgeting much easier, and it frees up massive amounts of your time -- at least initially.

In case you live on the moon, what happened last week was that a small amount of Microsoft source code was leaked to the Web. Granted, small is relative. The leaked code consisted of more lines than I've ever written in my life, but early measurements had it at about 15 percent of Windows 2000. Evidently, the leak was done by a vendor that uses th...