Articles by Rob Enderle

Picking a product of the year is anything but trivial because the products I cover every week range from headphones to laptops to books, cars and more. So, I thought I'd try something different this year and pick six products that each deserve the title and then name a winner that stands out from the rest. This allows me to simplify the task and g...

The reasons behind Apple's fight against Qualcomm seem as poorly founded as President Trump's reasons for wanting a wall. Pretty much everyone who understands walls -- including China, which has the biggest -- knows they don't really work. Unless you can afford to man the thing, people will find ways over or under it. With ever-bigger drones in de...

This is the time of year for a product guide, and this year I thought I'd list my favorite unusual products as gift ideas. I'm a big fan of products most people don't have that solve a specific work problem, as well as those that could make your (or my) life easier, more comfortable or more fun. I like to give gifts that people actually would use....

I'm a longtime Jaguar fan. I've owned a ton of them over the years, and I've had both good and bad experiences with the cars. Currently I own two -- a 1970 XKE and a 2014 F-Type -- and they are about to get a sibling. I've ordered a new Jaguar I-Pace, which is the first legitimate challenger to Tesla, which surprised the automotive industry much like Apple surprised the mobile phone industry. ...

A news item that surfaced last week was particularly interesting and personal for me. Several years ago, my wife and I invested in a project called "Sanctuary Belize," and, like many of the investors, we were incredibly excited about the prospect of retiring in paradise After a time, things just weren't adding up, which prompted my column, "Tarnish...

Startups have been creating employee hell in Silicon Valley. That was in the forefront of my mind as I read the book Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us. I think this book should be required reading for anybody who thinks working for a startup in Silicon Valley would be fun. Unless you are into humiliation and abu...

Several of us have become increasingly concerned about the lack of ethics on the part of market-leading companies at the moment. Kara Swisher's New York Times column is an eye opener, considering that she concluded that "too many digital leaders have lost their minds." She cited some frightening examples of poor leadership -- ranging from Saudi fun...

Things have been changing at an almost unprecedented rate with regard to power structures. The last time I saw this happen was in the 1970s, when the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission took off. Suddenly a lot of the off-color, sexist and racist jokes that many executives regularly told could get them fired. A surprisingly large number of people got reassigned, fired, demoted, or otherwise punished for the same behavior that previously had made them "one of the guys." ...

For much of this year, technology companies have been showcased in a very poor light. There was the coverage of Facebook's adverse impact on the 2016 U.S. elections (and other elections worldwide); there was Intel's security scandal and the firing of its CEO following reports suggestive of insider trading; there was the Google+ breach and coverup;...

There were two interesting product launches last week. HP delivered what is pretty much a clean slate rethinking of the 2-in-1 PC with the HP Folio, and Microsoft unveiled a refresh of its Surface Line. Both firms made a big deal of the fact that their products were much better than their Apple counterparts -- but Apple has been treating PCs like...

Like many of you I watched last week's Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, and I was struck by the fact that they seemed to be more about the Democrats fighting with Republicans to see which party could corrupt the Supreme Court more effectively than they were about senators doing their jobs. What bothers me most about that is, regardless of the goal, if you corrupt the highest court in the land you effectively destroy the Constitution -- and by doing so, the country. ...

An interview with IBM CEO Ginni Rometty, conducted earlier this month by Walter Isaacson for Amanpour & Co. on PBS, is worth watching. Ginni is one of the most successful CEOs in the United States. One of the questions that jumped out at me had to do with why the number of female CEOs has been declining. I've followed several female CEOs over the...

The European Union has been stretching its wings. In the shadow of Brexit, it apparently has decided it has the real enemy of the people in its sights: social media companies and Google. France is even more aggressive than the EU overall, suggesting that the region's "right to be forgotten" law should apply worldwide. Given that it actually does f...

It should be pretty clear by now that the level of effort devoted to manipulating our opinions is unprecedented at the moment. Granted, a lot of this has to do with the fact that most of the "free" online services we use aren't free at all. They are trading our ability to make measured opinions for advertisers' money, and some of these "advertisers" are foreign governments. ...

Bias is a nasty beast. A market research class I took in graduate school focused on the identification and elimination of bias. My final paper was on an intentionally biased piece of research. It was far easier to introduce bias and then talk about the bias than it would have been to attempt to do unbiased work and defend it as unbiased For that re...

I'm getting increasingly concerned that Tesla will go under and set back the electric car industry a decade or more. At the beginning of the last century, electric, steam and gas all competed for the automotive industry, resulting in far more advancements in gas cars than electric over the decades. Thankfully, no one has brought back steam. The...

When I read the book Ready Player One, I really got excited about the future of virtual reality, but the movie really didn't do the book justice. Some blockbusters have succeeded in interspersing computer graphics with real people and making it hard to tell the difference. Still, a totally rendered movie still looks like animation and you just don't get the film quality you get from, well, film. ...

Tesla is trending to fail spectacularly. (CEO Elon Musk actually has an impressive failure history.) Tesla has been burning cash at an unsustainable rate, and it keeps making avoidable mistakes that weaken it. Here's what is weird: You'd think the firm's biggest problem would be that every large car maker was working behind the scenes to kill it....

Apple is one of the most popular and powerful companies in the United States, and last week it became the most valuable as well. That news brought back some personal memories of my time at IBM, when it was the most powerful and valuable technology company in the world. For a long time, it seemed virtually untouchable. However, IBM went off the ...

I just finished The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity, and it was one hell of a read A lot of us are concerned about the coming of robots that arguably will be substantially smarter and more capable than we are. This book likely will make some feel a tad more comfortable about the future, because it points ou...