Articles by Rob Enderle

The U.S. has a history of killing companies critical to its future. With the original Standard Oil, that company had gained too much political power, but in breaking up the company, the U.S. government gave control of the oil market to the Middle East. RCA had too much power, and when the U.S. broke up the company, it gave that consumer market to post-war Japan...

2020 began a decade that I think will be defined by irony. I'll skip over the prominent political examples and jump right into social media and drill down to focus on Facebook Last week we ran a survey asking people which of the CEOs who were questioned by Congress last month is the most trustworthy. Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg took the dubious priz...

Like a lot of you, last week I watched the congressional testimony from the CEOs of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google -- and there were a lot of apparent things that were problematic One is that there are folks in Congress that likely shouldn't be in Congress (and if you watched the testimony you know who I'm talking about), and another is that ea...

Much of my time these last few weeks has been spent looking at schools and companies that tried and often failed to pivot to remote work and education One of the biggest problems has been connectivity. Our infrastructure just wasn't set up to suddenly shift massive amounts of traffic from companies to homes. Exacerbating this has been cable network...

I've been covering video conferencing since before we called it video conferencing. I became interested in it when I was a kid at Disneyland around 1965. It has been an exciting and somewhat painful technology to watch because it seemed like everyone in the segment fundamentally didn't understand that if you don't have interoperability and didn't ...

IBM is chasing two of the three technology areas that I think will change the world as we know it over the next two decades. Granted, we are currently experiencing a level of unprecedented change, thanks to the pandemic, and it is dramatically accelerating at least one of these efforts The three technology changes that I'm watching are robotics (in...

Last week must have been car week because I was getting news releases that had Tesla last on the latest JD Power survey while the company again became the most valuable car company in the world. That report was pretty interesting because I think it spoke more to expectations than absolute initial quality, but I'll get to that I also got a press rel...

Some of the corporate responses to COVID-19 make me incredibly happy I don't work for a large company anymore. Some of the troubling reports from other companies include forced work in unsafe areas, not enough -- or any -- protection gear, massive layoffs and furloughs, and the sense that a critical mass of well-paid CEOs and politicians don't get that many people live paycheck to paycheck...

Twitter had a data security problem last week that might sound trivial. Email addresses, phone numbers, and the last four digits of the credit cards used to buy ads on Twitter were left in the browser cache after the transaction, and that cache was not secured This may seem trivial, but the consequences could be far more significant than you might ...

Cisco Live was last week, and this was their first large-scale virtual event. What made this event very different from the other games was the amount of effort they put into socially responsible projects I'm not just talking about their Corporate Social Responsibility efforts. Many of the customer projects they highlighted are dealing with a variet...

I've been working from home for nearly 20 years, but being locked up at home due to the pandemic still drove me a little nuts. Several technology products have been particularly helpful while sheltering in place, making this semi-forced timeout feel less like a punishment and more like something I could endure I'll close with my product of the week...

In these trying times, kids have to deal with a lot of stuff they weren't prepared for: a significant loss of weeks of education, damaged GPAs, and no assurance they'll be going back in the fall. However, some schools were able to pivot because they already had implemented remote programs that were mature, easily implemented, and designed by teac...

I'm a member of what is likely a reasonably sizable informal group of people who trained to be a CEO but declined the job -- in my case, several times. So I don't envy the position that Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is in as he tries to figure out a way to do the right thing concerning the spread of false information and defend his company against an attack by the designated leader of the free world. ...

One of the exciting things that came out of Microsoft Build during the analyst preview was that the company has been working to create virtual court solutions. I spend a surprisingly large amount of time following court cases and sitting in courtrooms. If done right, a virtual system could fix a lot of court-related problems It would allow judges ...

Nvidia held its GTC event last week, and of the virtual keynotes I've seen so far, CEO Jensen Huang's was the best. That's because the company made the decision to cut it into segments, mostly under 16 minutes, so viewers didn't have to watch things they weren't interested in Also, Jensen mixed up the content between the speaker, videos and static ...

IBM's outgoing CEO Ginni Rometty gave a compelling talk at IBM Think last week on how the company is fighting strategically for diversity. I know of only one other company, Cisco, that is taking a genuinely holistic, strategic view of the problem, resulting in a broad positive impact The reason I can name only two companies is that most are taking ...

The pandemic may force certain improvements but I'm not sure that it will, because political distractions are doing a rather good job of drawing our focus away from fixing things now. For instance, we should be ramping domestic manufacturing of PPEs and ventilators permanently to prepare for a likely huge fall spike in COVID-19 infections. Still,...

Some of the corporate responses to COVID-19 make me incredibly happy I don't work for a large company anymore. Some of the troubling reports from other companies include forced work in unsafe areas, not enough -- or any -- protection gear, massive layoffs and furloughs, and the sense that a critical mass of well-paid CEOs and politicians don't get that many people live paycheck to paycheck...

The reason governments had to shut down economies is that in the face of a pandemic, we could not tell who was sick and who was not. While widespread testing followed by a vaccine eventually will curb this virus, what about the next one? As we have seen, it takes months to develop tests and remedies for a new disease and more than a year to develo...

Some states, including Colorado and Oregon, where I live, defaulted to mail-in ballots some time ago, and their elections are unconstrained by the pandemic. However, in many parts of the U.S., the prevailing attitude is that the Web lacks enough security for elections. That strikes me as odd, given that we now use the Internet to manage our finances, our healthcare, our businesses, our travel -- and increasingly our shopping, including for food...