Rob Enderle

One of the problems with the customer lock-in strategy that Apple uses is that the vendor tends to take customers for granted. Unlike Microsoft and IBM, which learned from lock-in strategy mistakes that nearly destroyed them, Apple faces little competition because it believes its customers can’t move. IBM and Microsoft discovered that allowing competition keeps […]

Smart Windows have a lot of promise. Eventually, these windows may be able to both block out light, increase privacy, and showcase scenes from other locations, giving you fantastic views from any place in the world regardless of where you are. Initially, they worked as virtual blinds, but initial efforts only worked in new installations, […]

Last year, my favorite phone was the Microsoft Surface Duo, but while it met my needs impressively well for a first-generation product, it had several critical flaws. Typically with any genuinely innovative new design, it takes three versions to approach the ideal. The second version is often the most changed, while the third makes tuning […]

Microsoft announced this week that the company is moving away from passwords. This move may seem sudden, but I was part of a study IBM did back in the 1980s where it was determined that passwords were a significant security exposure and should be eliminated. And here we are nearly four decades later, and finally, […]

This week Mark Papermaster had a fireside chat with a few of us analysts on the topic of AMD’s remarkable rise from the ashes over the last decade. Papermaster, who had a long career at IBM before stints at Apple and Cisco (including a landmark court case on employee non-compete clauses), joined AMD a decade […]

Artificial intelligence, like any other tool, isn’t inherently good or bad. But AI does automate and emulate other things in ways that make it very difficult for a potential victim to identify a scam. AI can be trained to not only emulate a practice, good or bad, but to do so at scale vastly exceeding […]

Facebook announced its Horizon Workrooms Virtual Reality (VR) effort in yet another attempt to figure out how to use VR to create an alternative to conference rooms. However, the conference room construct is based on the limitations of the technology that created it. In light of that, it is probably not a good template to […]

The Robert N. Noyce Award is the top honor that the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) gives out annually. It is given in recognition of an industry leader who has made the most significant contribution to the semiconductor industry in technology or public policy. In many cases, with this year being a representative example, the Award […]

I’ve been covering PCs since the birth of the market back in the early 1980s. What I think is fascinating, given that IBM largely drove the early adoption of PCs into the enterprise, is that the company never grasped that the market didn’t want the PC at the time. The idea of everyone having their […]

Intel has just finished hosting a series of meetings with market and industry analysts at its Santa Clara headquarters. While the press was not invited, that’s not to say analysts there were sworn to total secrecy. Rob Enderle gives Datamation the story that’s not under NDA. For several days I’ve been at the annual Intel […]

In a column on Datamation, industry analyst Rob Enderle details the implications from the latest bout of interest in what we today call “cloud computing”. Who’s best positioned to capitalize on the trend? And who’s likely to fail? It’s interesting that we tend to go through cycles. We started off with big centralized computers and […]

Dan Lyons recently posted an opinion piece on why Steve Ballmer is no Bill Gates, titled “The Lost Decade.” Steve Ballmer is under a microscope at the moment, so let’s talk about why this is, and whether the position that Lyons and others are taking is reasonable. I’ve worked with and for a number of […]