Rob Enderle Quotes

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.

The most recent annoying survey is the one that predicts Windows 8 Tablets will fail because there is no demand for the product. I'm sure a similar survey made a year before the iPhone or iPad would have likely concluded the same thing about those products.

Apple is becoming more and more like a typical tech firm — that is, long on technology and short on magic. ... Apple is drifting closer and closer to where it was back in the 1990s. It offers advancements that largely follow those made by others years earlier, product proliferation, a preference for more over simple elegance, and waning excitement.

[W]hen it came to the iWatch, also a name that Apple didn't own, Apple walked away from it and instead launched the Apple Watch. Certainly, no risk of litigation, but the product's sales are a fraction of what they otherwise might have been with the proper name and branding.

Donald [Trump] has been branded by one of his competitors as a con artist and, in a sense, he is. But so was Steve Jobs.

[W]hen Apple wanted the name "iPhone" and it was owned by Cisco, Steve Jobs just took it, and his legal team executed so he could keep it. It turned out that doing this was surprisingly inexpensive. And, as the Apple Watch showcased, the Apple Phone likely would not have sold anywhere near as well as the iPhone.

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.

I do think it is likely a tad frustrating for Gates to watch his own company pivot and be successful with new initiatives while Apple gets a huge valuation even though its latest efforts have underperformed or, like the HomePod, largely failed in market.

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.

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.

BlackBerry isn't getting out of the hardware business. It stands alone as the only smartphone company exclusively focused on business, security and traditional communication. Until someone else steps up to meet this need, there continues to be a market for its hardware ...

Apple has recently done more with the tablet format with the iPod Touch and iPhone then any other vendor but the jury is still largely out on this format with challenging devices from RIM, Palm, and Google often showcasing that keyboards are necessary.

[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.

Chen is not only ahead of Steve Jobs in terms of turnaround speed, he has done something that both HP and Sun failed at: turned a hardware company into a software and services company, arguably something Jobs couldn't have done. ... Jobs smartly decided to kill the process at Apple to transition that company to software and services. Jobs didn't understand how to do that and would have likely failed because he was just a hardware guy.

[T]he litigation between Qualcomm and Apple/Intel ... is weird. What makes it weird is that Intel appears to think that by helping Apple drive down Qualcomm prices, it will gain an advantage, but since its only value is as a lower cost, lower performing, alternative to Qualcomm's modems, the result would be more aggressively priced better alternatives to Intel's offerings from Qualcomm/Broadcom, wiping Intel out of the market. On paper, this is a lose/lose for Intel and even for Apple. The lower prices would flow to Apple competitors as well, lowering the price of competing phones. So, Apple would not get a lasting benefit either.