OOOoooooooh Rob!

Rob Enderle LOVES writing articles! He writes so many of them you might believe he would actually be good at it by now but he usually fills them with lots of stuff so misinformed, it’s a wonder that he actually gets paid for it. In his latest (link), he claims that Apple NEEDS Microsoft to do really well to save OS X. Well, at least he claims that in the title. I read it and really couldn’t find anything that substantiates this. Oh, there was some Microsoft history, (incorrect) Apple history, and some talk about Google’s Android platform, but he never really weaves it together into any kind of tapestry you might want to hang on a wall.

Wow, whatever Rob is smoking he should share. What does Microsoft have to do with whatever future success Apple may (or may not) have? Android is on few phones, isn’t a desktop OS, and so far Windows 7 has gotten much in the way of good press that Vista never got.

As far as Jobs goes, Enderle can’t even remember the past very accurately. When Jobs got booted out of Apple, the Mac was hardly going like gangbusters and Apple actually had more success AFTER Steve left. It was very poor marketing, the Performa/Centris/Quadra model nightmare, a floundering OS strategy, the debacle of the Newton, and a badly conceived clone model that almost finished off Apple. Steve came back and made some very right (and a few wrong) moves that got the company focused again. The iMac, iPod, iTunes, and OS X is what brought Apple back from the brink. Strategic partnerships (buying NeXT, getting MS off their ass to put out a new version of MS Office) helped as well.

At the end of the article, Enderle makes a very interesting statement in his little bio…

“Rob Enderle is one of the last Inquiry Analysts. Inquiry Analysts are paid to stay up to date on current events and identify trends and either explain the trends or make suggestions, tactical and strategic, on how to best take advantage of them.”

You know why he’s one of the LAST Inquiry Analysts? Because none of them (including Rob) is very good at actually predicting future trends in technology.