Rob Enderle wrote an intriguing editorial for Digital Trends entitled "You can't call 'time out' in Silicon Valley," which examines the current battle between Apple, Google and Microsoft over the future of computing. In it, he draws some interesting parallels from the history of warfare, and notes that Microsoft and Google have made some of the classic blunders that have caused great armies to fail dramatically.
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2009-08-15
Thom,
I'm familiar with Rob Enderle's opinions, in particular, his open hostility to FOSS. From the wikipedia entry on him
<quote>
Enderle's analysis of free and open source software, Linux in particular, is disputed by the FOSS community.[19][20] Speaking publicly in 2004 in a talk announced under the title "Free Software and the Fools Who Use it"[21] and presented under the title "Free Software and the Idiots who Buy It" Enderle explained his "position on Linux as a Free software scam" claiming that "it doesn't contribute to anything" (i.e. neither any common good nor any private good) and that "it may not even be sustainable on a large scale". He went on to state that those who doubt SCO's right to extract revenue from Linux users "are attacking because they disagree with the legal rights of these companies" without mention that the Linux community believes that SCO is infringing on the rights of Linux's authors.[22][23] Enderle has consistently and repeatedly recommended against Linux and intimated its failure writing such things as: "Moving away from Red Hat is the better of the two options..."[24] (2004); "... the PC OEMs don't, and probably never will, fully support Linux on the desktop"[25] (2006); "Linux exists in an environment where ... the opportunity for traditional, old style, data breach is immeasurable."[26] (2007).
</quote>
I don't see how it's more possible to be inflammatory than that quote. After reading the Google vs. Apple part I can't help but wonder if this is not just yet another tired astroturf ploy.
Here are two articles you might find interesting concerning the relationship between Enderle and Microsoft:
<quote>
http://techrights.org/2008/12/11/rob-enderle-amazing-numbers/
</quote>
And
<quote>
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=990DE1DC1F3FF933A257...
</quote>
Edited 2011-04-04 03:11 UTC
RE: Thom I would take what Rob says with a boulder of salt
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If you're using a Bada, WebOS or Android phone or tablet then you're running a consumer product on top of a Linux kernel.
Smartphones, tablets, media players, set-top boxes and cloud solutions. Linux is all there, pervasively invading the consuming industry. Only a minor sector cares as you said, but a major part of clueless consumers is using it.
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Oh, did he? Enderle is making things up, as always.
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Yeah, that's true... Although, as I understand it, the original OS 8 based iMac was in development before the return of Jobs... So he did "Fight with the army he had", at least to a large degree in the early days of his return.
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You're definitely correct that Apple dumped everything they had, and for good reason: MacOS was getting real creaky, and PPC was losing ground fast. But the point I was trying to draw attention to was that Apple didn't curl up in the fetal position until OSX was ready. In fact, they pushed forward very strong with their lineup of candy-colored PPC machines running OS9, and worked overtime to make the transition from OS9 to OSX as smooth as possible, then later from PPC to x86.
Now, you can say that it's dishonest to keep pretending that your crap OS and crap hardware are great while you're laying the groundwork to release something better over the next few years, but considering how smoothly the transitions went, due in large part to a lot of attention to detail and hacking skillz on the part of Apple's engineering team, I think they rewarded their userbase adequately.
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Enderle might be what you describe. But for me, who didn't know the guy and thus can't cringe at reading his name, David's article was an interesting read. So no, I don't think he wasted an entry. In fact, before reading the comments, I clicked the "recommend this" button.
On the other hand, some user comments seem totally useless.
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My point was: remove his name or, if you can, forget that it's him who wrote the article, and it would not look like misinformation or misdirection any longer.
In and of itself, what I read isn't misinformation and it isn't a piece of intentional deception. Even delusional liars sometimes tell the truth. It might be what happened here.
But yes, I understand your point; it's like Nintendo having each other year a new batch of people beguiled by an umpteenth rehash of a Mario, Donkey Kong or Zelda game.
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I realize that Enderle has a bad reputation, and that's one of the reasons that I made sure to attribute the original article to him explicitly in the description, which we don't usually do. Nevertheless, I did find his analysis of the situation to be insightful, and where I doubted his claims, I pointed that out. (I'm not sure that Google is really starving the Android project for resources).
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2006-10-20
Linux is still a WIP but it's progress is very rapid. 2.6.40 is meant to have nouveau power management on Fermi GPUs. That'll see performance LEAP up on the current generation nvidia cards. They already reverse engineered CUDA. It's only a matter of time before the GPL'd drivers catch up to the closed source ones. In 2 years time Linux gpu drivers will be where wifi is now. Working out of the box with no config from users with all major expected features supported. After that it's just a matter of app support.
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Thank you David for the article. Not only was your rendition of it a welcome summary, but, contrary to what other posters insinuated from their knowledge of its author, the linked article is not the debatable piece of writing I was expected.
And yes, I read the comments before reading the linked articles.
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That is one market Microsoft owned by default... and then they lost it... not once... but twice.
First Microsoft had both the mail server (Exchange) and a mobile device... and yet they got beaten by RIM to mobile email.
Next, they solve the email problem... and then they get beaten by Apple on the device as well as the software ecosystem.
It's hilarious if you think about it.
My own view is Microsoft's mobile failure was really corporate misdirection. They kept trying to have a unified OS that looked the same in mobile as it did on the desktop. Early mobile versions even had the start menu.
Now that they changed the corporate direction, they have released a decent mobile OS... but it took them a really long time... lol.
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2005-07-12
I'm going to post it here too:
Excuse me for saying this entire article reeks of card stacking manipulation who's only purpose can be to push some form of social agenda. I say this because once again we have a writer using the "percentages to promote a lie" methodology.
There is a complete lack of saying "A percentage of what?". The iPad took 5% of what? A market the group the article is using as the subject had little to no presence in? Shouldn't that more be 100%? What market is that percentage even in comparison to? Overall computers? Handhelds? Are you counting phones in that, a market MS has barely had a foothold in to begin with?
... and immediately in the next paragraph it's lather rinse, repeat with the "oh IE has gone from 90% to 50%" idiocy. WHY do I call it idiocy? Because during the timeframe where IE went from it's 2005's 90% to todays 50%, the number of Internet users has grown from 800 million to roughly 2 billion... 90% of 800 million is 720 million. 50% of 2 billion is 1 billion. So while they've "lost" 40% market share they've GAINED 280 million users. That means Microsoft hasn't lost a blasted thing, and you're using percentages to lie.
That's one of the hardest concepts to grasp about "share" and why it's used to perpetuate these types of outright lies. It is entirely possible in a still expanding market to lose share and STILL HAVE GROWTH!!! That's why serious businessmen know "share" is often meaningless.
There are SO many questions you have to ask when these types of percentages are listed. How many people are being counted twice? It's like counting Droid users -- I've got a droid tablet, a Symbian Phone running Opera mobile, Opera on my home desktop and Firefox at work -- how often am I counted. Does my using Chrome on droid mean I'm not using Opera? Take a buddy of mine with his iPhone, but still uses IE8 on the desktop... How is he figured into this?
ALWAYS ask "a percentage of what?" -- and if the pool size has changed, the groups sampled are different, or if unrelated items are for some reason lumped together, every conclusion the source is trying to push is called into question.
Basically people, don't allow percentages be used to LIE TO YOU!
Edited 2011-04-04 17:16 UTC
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This was a really interesting article, and also a nice write-up, so I'm glad it made it onto OSnews.
However, I kind of feel the whole premise of the argument is somewhat flawed. Microsoft isn’t losing the browser wars. Microsoft certainly isn’t losing the PC wars. And Google isn’t losing the phone wars either.
Comparing Microsoft and Apple, they both have (and have always had) very different forms of modus operandi. Apple produces a very particular type of focussed, well-designed product that perfects the user-experience of already existing technologies. Microsoft on the other hand produces very general products that perfect the developer process, and then fights a war of attrition against the existing technologies. Microsoft fought this war and won against Mozilla, Borland, Palm, Lotus Notes, Wordperfect, Java, IM, OpenGl, Real Networks, OS/2, Classic Mac OS, etc. It’s currently using the same tactics against Flash, Apache, phones, tablets, advertising, OS X, games consoles and everything Google does.
Personally I fear this stifles innovation and diminishes the whole experience of using computers. But I have to admit there’s a good chance Microsoft will win these latter wars as well. For example, for a long time I thought Nokia had ‘won’ against Microsoft. It turns out, attrition was probably the right tactic.
Apple is an amazing company that’s experiencing incredible growth right now, but whenever I see an article that suggests there’s a company with better business sense than Microsoft, it always seems to ring somewhat hollow. Empires will crumble though, and I’d be very happy to be proven wrong.
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2010-12-22