Articles by Rob Enderle

Once again we are on countdown for Christmas, and many of you will take the easy way out and give cash, checks or one of those pre-paid cards that allow recipients to buy what they want at an after-Christmas sale. But for me there is something of a letdown in getting cash for Christmas, and I tend not to remember the gift or associate the purchase with the gift giver. As a result, the only time I give cash is when cash is the thing the recipient most needs...

The Insane World of Home Electronics 2: Media DistributionLast week we chatted about home automation. This week we move on to home media distribution On top of the automation projects in my home I mentioned last week, I've also centralized my two TiVos and can watch time-shifted programming throughout the house. In addition, I surrounded my home...

As a guest of AMD, I went to Indianapolis to watch the top Ferrari team once again whomp the other nine teams in what remains one of the most expensive sports in the world. This racing team has been winning for so long and is so dominant in this sport that I often wonder why anyone watches these races anymore. The outcome often seems preordained Th...

I'm a home automation nut. When I moved into my home a friend and I spent a week and $2,000 replacing all of the wall switches and many of the plugs with remote switches. I can now turn on and off my lights and sprinklers from my bed. (The latter is a handy anti-barking tool: Wet dogs bark less.) In the 1980s I got a little carried away and comput...

The two major initiatives in the consumer market this year have to do with digital media, and they are from Microsoft and Apple. Microsoft's is the broad Media Center Edition that encompasses the home and provides your music on a variety of products, while Apple's is more targeted at just PCs (both Apple and Windows) and the iPod. The two companies overlap in only one area -- the Windows PC -- and even here they differ in approach. Apple is mostly music (although it just added still images to the iPod) and Microsoft has consistently pushed the envelope with music, pictures and video...

Last week I wrote about three companies that had either followed an Apple-like strategy (Gateway), utilized ex-Apple employees (OQO), or executed on a founding Apple principle (AMD/Microsoft) This week we'll examine three more companies that owe a lot of what they are to Apple, as part of my not-so-subtle look at what might have been had Apple been...

There are many "what if" stories surrounding Apple, and one of them is this: What if, when Microsoft asked Apple to license its OS, Apple had done so, becoming the core technology in Windows instead of a closed platform If that had happened, it is widely believed, Apple would be larger than Dell now, rather than smaller than Acer. But who knows, m...

When I first started college I bought a calculator. It was from Radio Shack, and it was hand-held, did basic math functions, had an LED display and cost, if you adjust for inflation, about what a laptop computer costs today. There are pre-kindergarten children today using technology that is vastly more advanced then what I had access to, and the pace is still accelerating...

The personal computer market got a much needed shot in the arm last week when Microsoft launched the latest version of its media center offering, Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005. We are rolling into the 4th quarter, which is critical to the PC industry, and the market is in the doldrums. But the new media center platform may have given this segment a whole lot more than just a shot in the arm...

The Fall Processor Forum was held last week in the Silicon Valley. This show has become the counter to Intel's Developer Forum (IDF), and it probably should now be called "The Everything but Intel Microprocessor Forum." It kind of feels like the rebuttal in a presidential debate. Intel, as the incumbent, got to argue a few weeks ago at IDF that th...

Budget ready or not, we are now moving into the countdown for Christmas, and it is time to start looking at some of the more interesting products you probably won't see at your local Best Buy For an awfully long time, the affordable notebook products have been, well, butt ugly. You might have bought one anyway, but it was really hard to get past t...

A little over a decade ago the market for aftermarket radios and gear for cars was relatively robust. At that time most car companies used standard-sized radios, and if you wanted to upgrade it was a relatively simple task That isn't the case anymore. Radios are increasingly designed-in to cars and some, like those licensed from Bose, are so diffic...

The Institute of Internal Auditors Research Foundation has issued areportproviding strong guidance on how to assess exposure for personal technology, with a heavy focus on personal computers The report is titled "PC Management Best Practices: A Study of the Total Cost of Ownership, Risk, Security, and Audit."

We just had a back-to-school flop. There was no apparent marketing of technology products, particularly PCs. And, surprise, we now have inventory problems and companies are warning that Christmas might not materialize as a major buying event either Given how fragile the technology recovery is -- or perhaps was -- I thought it would be a good time t...

The consumer electronics industry has been in the doldrums for some time and it wasn't until personal computer-based technology started to creep in that we began to see, quite literally, what we had been missing This isn't to say that the PC industry had it right, either. Both industries have a very strange view of the skills a typical buyer has or...

I had a chance to chat with the recently promoted director of IT from Cummins awhile back on a large deployment of Windows XP machines. She saved her company around US$10 million, which resulted in promotions for her and her team. I thought it would be interesting to explore this because it represents what is likely a good practice when it comes not only to deploying lots of desktop hardware very quickly, but also to addressing any complex project...

I come from a time when getting ready for school meant buying a couple of binders, some pencils and some new clothes you wouldn't be caught dead in. Transportation was a one-speed bicycle (no I didn't walk 10 miles in the snow, that was my grandfather), and high tech was a circular slide rule My first calculator, from Radio Shack, cost more than so...

One of the biggest questions a person will deal with in his or her life, regardless of the career path, is ethics. We make trade-offs when we "borrow" a stapler from work, take a sick day to go fishing or play golf, and take credit for something that was done by someone else. In the wake of the Enron, WorldCom and even Martha Stewart scandals, maybe its time we took a look at our own ethics and, by way of example, I'll focus this week on industry and IT analysts...

A couple of things happened last month that got me thinking about Apple and Sun and their failed merger attempt years ago. Sun held its lab tour event at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, and Apple became outraged at Real Networks for making its Real Music services compatible with the iPod Before I get into this topic, let m...

I've been watching the e-voting concerns increase as the related technology proliferates across the country and have come to the conclusion that we are once again seeing the government act first and think second There is nothing inherently more unsecure with regard to electronically taking votes than in physically taking votes. What can make one mo...