Articles by Rob Enderle

This week, we will get one of the best views on how well the separation between the Palm hardware and software units is going, and, coincidentally, we'll also get yet another view of what probably would have happened had Apple taken a similar risk a few years ago and separated itself into hardware and software units. The fact that Apple missed a big opportunity resonates well with the conclusion that was inescapable once we saw how well the iPod did. Apple could have competed very well with PC vendors if it had stepped up to the challenge and not chickened out...

Last Thursday morning, the topic on the Today Show was the MyDoom worm. Matt Lauer, one of the show's two anchors, was interviewing an Internet expert and asked a question near and dear to my own heart: "Is this new virus cyberterrorism?" The expert said no, it was more like cyber vandalism. Clearly, IT experts are seeing a difference that many reporters and I don't see anymore. Even the Terrorism Research Center is now tracking the MyDoom virus...

At this time of year in the United States we have a tradition: It is called Super Bowl Sunday. In this annual tradition, we spend prodigious sums of money to have an extremely large TV installed in our homes, have lots of friends over to watch a bunch of guys run up and down a big lawn, and then fail to actually watch the game because we are too busy eating and talking. It doesn't matter anyway because the two teams playing are generally so mismatched that the outcome is almost always known in the first 15 minutes or so...

Here in the United States, we are in the midst of regularly scheduled insanity where, as part of the process to elect our top government official, the party that opposes the current administration does its best to discredit all of its eligible candidates and then wonders why a sitting president is almost always reelected for another term Each candi...

The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) held in Las Vegas every year is perhaps the most exciting show for the technology enthusiast to attend. There were several high-profile announcements made during the show -- and some were only made to a select number of analysts. Perhaps the biggest public announcement was the partnership between Apple and HP, which will create an HP-branded iPod that will work not only with iTunes, but also with HP's Media Center products based on Microsoft's platform...

As the market starts ramping up for what is likely to be a resurgence in IT spending and a mass attack on the consumer by every technology company on the planet, there will be a few key battles to watch this year. Some will go a long way toward defining the rest of the decade For starters, technology vendors apparently see consumers as easy picking...

Making a set of New Year's resolutions for myself is certainly helpful but generally not nearly as much fun as making them for others. The year 2003 has been a time of change. It has brought a lot of exciting new experiences for me, and, frankly, I'd like fewer of them in 2004. It is at this time of year that corporations often reflect on strategi...

Through much of the year I hear complaints about personal computers -- whether they are running Windows or the relatively rare alternatives. These complaints are typically about systems reliability, the costs resulting from migrating employees to new hardware, the cost associated with new employees and the massive costs associated with keeping software up to date...

I spent the middle part of last week at Microsoft headquarters. For the first time in a long while, I saw an energy that few firms I've covered or worked for have been able to match. It struck me that most of the folks who disagree with my perspective about Microsoft are thinking of the company the way it was about five years ago, which isn't accurate. A five-year-old viewpoint wouldn't accurately characterize Apple, HP, Dell or SCO either...

Last week was looking relatively uneventful until I got a copy of SCO CEO Darl McBride's "Open Letter" in which he argues that the Linux GPL is unconstitutional. Now, for some of you, you red-lined the letter and spent the next several hours posting your pronounced disagreement with this position to online bulletin boards. I have to admit that my first response to the letter was that McBride's brain had taken a trip and left his body behind. But if you throw out the assumption that McBride has completely lost his mind and read between the letter's lines, another story comes out...

We are a few days from the launch of the new MSN, so it seems appropriate to take a look back at the history of this property to get a better sense of what really didn't happen. Back in 1995, I was working for Dataquest where I made an aggressive prediction about how many users would adopt Windows 95. Using that prediction, Steve Case started screaming bloody murder that Microsoft would put him out of business in short order by instantly signing up tens of millions of customers and easily eclipsing AOL...

I spent several days at Comdex last week. If you were there -- and you work as a systems builder, a parts vendor or an analyst -- Comdex was a great show. If you work as an IT executive, you were probably disappointed because the show set IT expectations that it didn't fulfill. As usual, rumors were flying around that this would be the last Comdex. But with a reported 50 thousand people at the event, it seems a shame to throw the baby out with the bath water...

As I write this, I'm getting ready to leave for Comdex, where I'll moderate a panel on the importance of Microssoft's .NET framework. On the panel will be a bunch of folks representing Oracle, Apache and Microsoft To help me keep the peace among participants who rarely agree with each other, Laura DiDio from the Yankee Group will be providing the a...

While I was at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference last month, I finished Merrill R. Chapman's book In Search of Stupidity. In the book, from the perspective of an insider, he lays out the mistakes other companies have made to contribute inadvertently to the dominance of Microsoft. While our views differ as to how significant some blunders were in certain cases, in general Chapman does a good job documenting why many of these companies failed and why Microsoft succeeded...

Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference (PDC) is a relatively unique event in the industry. Unlike other conferences of its type, this one is largely staffed by Microsoft programmers -- the same kind of people who generally attend these things. People tend to connect better with those who are similar to them, which makes this kind of conference vastly more powerful than those that are staffed by marketing types talking to developers about what the company will do for them in the future (but often having no actual clue about what is really going on at the company)...

In my column last week -- "Pros, Priests and Zealots: The Three Faces of Linux" -- I divided the folks who have been writing to me about Linux into three groups. The most controversial statement I made in that column was a comment about the last group: I wrote that I was having trouble differentiating between terrorists and the glowing example of humanity I call the Linux Zealot...

Last week, in writing the column " image problem and my own view of the Linux community. Much as the Linux community sees just one aspect of Microsoft, the bad one, I tend to see just one aspect of the Linux community Generally speaking, our view of a person, initiative or company often comes from select perceptions. If you read Slashdot, for examp...

It might surprise you to know that, by survey, Microsoft has about 120 million happy customers. I'm guessing that, if you are reading this column, you probably aren't one of them. You might also be surprised to know that Microsoft surveys as one of the most-trusted vendors in the industry, and you likely wouldn't be surprised to hear that the comp...

I spend a lot of time listening to lots of folks complain that they don't have a choice, that big, bad Microsoft has come in and made their lives a living hell and that someone should do something about it. If you are one of those folks, today is your lucky day. I'm going to start telling you how to fix this problem. In this week's column, I address the "other" platforms. Next week, my column will be about how to use Microsoft products successfully...

Recently, a letter from the Linux community to SCO supposedly addressed the concerns SCO has created in the industry about open-source software However, the letter fails to accomplish its apparent goals and, in my opinion, actually increases SCO's short-term chances of successfully getting funding from large corporate Linux users. In fact, in readi...