Rob Enderle Quotes

Given Steve Jobs, for instance, is critical to Apple's success is there anything short of eating live babies on national TV that he should be fired for? Where would you draw that line or should he be held to the same rules and laws that the rest of us are held to?

If [Apple's watch] bounces, folks will begin to lose faith. ... watch the iWatch execution. That'll tell you whether this is a rebirth or the beginning of the end.

I asked the panel to list the companies that would certainly be around in the future — and those that wouldn't be. ... There was some disagreement about Oracle. Microsoft and Oracle said that Oracle would survive; Apache said it wouldn't. I also asked which companies would be dead. The panel agreed that it would be Apple, Sun and Novell.

[W]e're easily distracted with shiny things. Steve Jobs was an expert at showing us shiny things to get excited. ... Buying phones that favor entertainment would likely be career suicide ... Your job might actually depend on this phone, and no cool app, game or movie will mitigate that one Blackberry advantage.

Microsoft fully understands it can't beat Apple, Amazon or Google by chasing them, but it can beat them if it both revisits its old embrace and extend strategy, and then pulls a Steve Jobs to change the market.

Apple's a company whose valuation is based on the fact that they've got recurring, blockbuster products, that the, the lack of those, of late, is just killin' 'em.

At scale, [Microsoft] is likely the only company offering a cloud solution that is truly robust enough to be trusted in what has become an incredibly unsafe world.

[Apple] needs the support of the U.S. government in the way that BlackBerry has the support of the Canadian government. If not, it needs to think about moving phone leadership and operations to a country that will supply it with that defensive support. If it doesn't do this soon, it will eventually have its phones compromised and that could be the end of much of Apple's iPhone business.

Often, those who come into power quickly end up misusing that power ... we should, but we don't put in place strong controls to prevent rather than punish this bad behavior. Even Steve Jobs was almost fired a second time from Apple and might have ended up in jail for abuse of power (in his case backdating his own options without board approval) and, without Jobs, Apple likely not only not been the most valuable company in the world, but it likely would have failed last decade.

Bernie Madoff, who was put in jail for losing $64B actually looks damn good against the Cook's near 5X bigger loss.

We're creatures of habit. We lined up for the old Batman and Star Wars films long after they stopped being great, and we'll pay Apple the same courtesy if it loses its mojo.

[Google's] coming blend of Android and Chrome, coupled with Apple's move to emulate Surface, could result in a devastating outcome for Apple. ... I'm reading rumors that Apple is creating an Amazon Echo clone and I think it will be the world's next Zune. Ironically, this would likely make Ballmer really happy because the ghost of Sun Tzu will stop slapping him around and start focusing on Tim Cook.

Apple's move to vertical integration with processors could end up killing the iPhone, and the benefit just doesn't warrant the risk.

Often, firms that were successful start to fail after a successful CEO departs, largely because they spent little time mentoring the successor in making successful decisions. ... I think we are seeing this play out at Apple at the moment ...

Apple no longer owns the tablet market, and will likely lose dominance this year or next. ... this level of sustained dominance doesn't appear to recur with the same vendor even if it launched the category.