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Of course they all want to beat Apple's performance.

But as they say here: fat chance.

Apr 21, 08 - 09:18 am Comment from: MikeK

Ha ha...

Enderle now lifting from MDN, while Shaw Wu has been lifitng entire paragraphs from AppleInsider user's comments..

And to think, they get paid for this.

Apr 21, 08 - 09:21 am Comment from: GizmoDan

Rob Enderle is a hit troll. He advises failing PC companies that don't see what a bad advisor he is. And now they are forcing him to accept the Apple practices that he has been complaining about for years. Practices of a company that he blindly thinks has been going out of business for years.

These companies are not trying to "exploit Apple weaknesses". They are trying to stay alive while competing with Apple. Good luck!

I just love that us real Mac users know what everyone else is missing and what we have. I hope Apples percentage doesnt go too high, i dont want EVERYONE with a Mac.

Apple's weakness is the minority... good luck targetting the minority

Rob Enderle is a tool. I could be more specific, but I why bother wasting the words. Besides, Rob Enderle being a tool is a given.

Apr 21, 08 - 09:34 am Comment from: Ferf Muckmeyer

Enderle is a lunatic. Why do we even waste space on his articles? He can't write, he's obviously on Redmond's payroll and is completely out of touch with the market, not to mention reality.

Apple's supremacy will continue until hell freezes over. Period.

Enderle blathers, "...and suddenly Apple is the company that is more of an example of how to do things right than wrong..."

'suddenly' meaning: 'for those pundits & analysts who've either had their heads buried in their asses for the last 10 years, or knew exactly what was happening and tried to fight it with FUD. The general public is beginning to realize how excellent Apple products are, and how crappy Windoze / Vista is, so we're not able to get away with what we've been doing in the past.'

What a tool.

I sincerely hope nobody actually relies on this guy for information! I can't imagine he does this for a living. The poor guy is consistently (and I mean over the period of years) clueless.

Apr 21, 08 - 09:44 am Comment from: Cubert

"Over the last year...."

WTF??? Where has he been since 2002?

Innovation not imitation will increase consumer choices and improve product design.

Whilst clearly the article is pure crap as a whole, for MDN to say that as yet unannounced and unseen products influenced by apple products will have a poor user experience is pure speculation. Belittling as yet unseen efforts is in itself devoid of any meaning and quite a desperate way to respond, MDN defends Apple territory to the point of pure hysteria.

Apr 21, 08 - 09:51 am Comment from: Zune Tang®

Right on the money, Rob. Great work as always. My favorite line is this:

"…as good as iTunes is, anyone who has used it knows that it can be particularly irritating to a Windows user because of its Apple roots."

Irritating? More like atrocious. The I-Tunes abomination is why I and millions of others are embracing Zune and Zune Marketplace. I downloaded I-Tunes once on my Dell. I felt ashamed and dirty. Never again. Microsoft makes the whole widget and I don't have to put up with that namby-pamby Apple fluff nobody wants on a real world PC running Windows.

And you MAC sheep better not pester me with your 'everything just works' nonsense or how you smug lemmings think Apple is so cool right now. The reality is Apple's ruthless I-Tunes monopoly is about to fall. Hard. For something much better because for Microsoft and their partners it has always been about quality and user experience. You MAC dorks might want to look into it.

Your potential. Our passion.™

Just a thought : Could "we" make a site that posted Enderle and his likes ( Turrot, that fat old guy wich name I don´t remember, ++) drivelled articles ? The purpose would be to get people NOT to vist their sites but rather this site/blog "we" could create. How can "we" make that a legal opportunity ?"

Apr 21, 08 - 09:53 am Comment from: Cubert

@MikeK,

"while Shaw Wu has been lifitng entire paragraphs from AppleInsider user's comments.. "

Not that I don't believe you, but I would be interested in knowing more about this.

Apr 21, 08 - 09:54 am Comment from: WindozeKiller

Someone PLEASE tell me - Why do people leave those stupid stickers on. I saw a friends craptop (a sony Vaio) and it had an ATI radeon mobility sticker next to an intel inside sticker, next to a made for Windoze sticker. to make things worse, he put a name and address sticker below these. WTF?

This is like driving your car around for years with the faded and yellowing window sticker listing the feature/options/MSRP. They are supposed to be taken off after purchase.

Are people that stupid?!? Then again, they did choose Windoze.

Apr 21, 08 - 10:01 am Comment from: John Gee

Wow...he just writes bologna.

Soon, wicked awesome things are gonna happen. Cuz like, there are these companies who are like, we gotta be way better than Apple and their iPhone. So like, everyone of these companies are gonna start being awesome and start to chip away at Apple.

I am so glad this guy talks to all these companies. No wonder they can't succeed!

Apr 21, 08 - 10:06 am Comment from: ElderNorm

Hey guys, its Enderle after all. And I find it funny and sad at the same time that he is still trying to push how great PCs and Windows is.

They just need a little patching here and there and they will be greater than Apple!! -- That comment must have stuck in his craw.

Just trust Enderle, soon windows will be greater than Apple, trust us, please, oh and pay us as well. LOL

PC manufacturers have only themselves to blame. Quality of Windows aside, they let Microsoft do all the work for them and now when they need something better to compete with Apple the only options they have are to either: "Fix" windows, build something from scratch, build up Linux, or somehow convince Apple to license their golden goose. None of which are gonna happen - at least not anytime soon. Apple made the commitment to hold their destiny - good or bad - in their own hands. If they succeed they make all the profit and take all the glory, if they fail they at least do so trying.

Apr 21, 08 - 10:07 am Comment from: Cubert

@WindozeKiller,
Those stickers are Winblows users little badges of pain - a daily masochistic reminder.

Apr 21, 08 - 10:07 am Comment from: iamdj

"suddenly"?

How long of a success rate does Apple need before columnists will stop using words like "suddenly" to describe Apple.

I think that is the biggest insult really.

For a guy who does not even understand Apple to advise Apple's "competitors" on how to attack Apple, is flat out ridiculous.

Marketing goons who pay this guy - and others like him - are so out of touch as to what a good product is, it is no wonder they higher Rob and ilk to "advise" then as to what to do.

Companies trying to go after Apple and copy their products... Gee this sounds familiar. Oh yes, MP3 players. This is exactly what was tried, and it only catapulted Apple to 70%+ MP3 market share, while everyone else was set in the white noise of a wanna-be product.

Keep going Rob and crew. Rob can take your money, while you spit out late-to-market, un-innovative copy products of Apple's.

Wow! You'd think Enderle is like a secret tech agent or something privy to a lot of information he could tell us but he'd have to kill us. Incredible that this one-man tech advisor knows so much! Every tech company willing to share their most treasured r&d;secrets with him.

if the "sole purpose" of these companies' products are to "take market share away from Apple," then they're in trouble

Many of the auto industry players exist solely to take market share away from each-other. And yes some are in trouble there as well.

Well-run companies are all about profitably providing the best possible products and services. Market share will set itself.

Apr 21, 08 - 10:18 am Comment from: Harvey

MDN reacts to any press about Apple as bad press, but this is the best press Apple could ever get.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. This strong vindication should make Apple feel very, very good. If fifteen years ago, I had been the nerdy kid that no one liked, and now everyone was trying to be like me, I'd be ecstatic beyond bounds.

What's really interesting is that Apple's influence has extended into other, completely unrelated industries! No one will ever top Apple's excellence, of course, but even if they just make it up halfway, what an improvement that will be for us--everything from cars to can openers are about to get easier to use. Not as easy as if Apple made them, but easier than they are now, and I'm looking forward to it. Just the prospect of a TV remote control I can actually figure out is enough to get me excited.

Steve Jobs has now experienced the business equivalent of being canonized a saint. Congratulations!

The bad taste sticker story is surely well told in Pixar's "Cars"?

Lightning McQueen: the good looking hero...Apple.

The King: the elderly 'Big Blue' of IBM.

Chick Hicks: the green, sticker laden PC, green with envy, underhand and everything Microsoft.

Apr 21, 08 - 10:35 am Comment from: Jubei

After he wrote the article and typed that last period, her farted.

Yeah thats exactly how much credibility he will receive from his articles. All full of gas.

This guy is soooo out of touch with consumers and where the market is, he's completely lost it.

He should go to Washington and report on politics instead - he'd fit in well there.

> MacDailyNews Take: The man can barely write.

He can barely think. All these companies with poor taste trying to "out-Apple Apple?" Thin and sexy "with a huge push toward colors"? "Choice/battery life/ports"? So we're going back to floppies and SCSIs?

"And don't give us the failed dream of Linux on the desktop (despite years of hype, that simply is not happening ..."

Now that's an interesting comment from MDN.

I think Linux-based distros could give MS some pain at the low end of the market -- the Eee PC is, isn;t it? -- but I'd agree they can hardly challenge MS at the high end .... which is where Apple is making hay.

The fact is it's not Linux -- the kernel -- that's the issue here but the desktop environment. Currently, KDE is going through a big refresh. It may -- almost certainly will -- be vastly improved coming out the other side, but that's a way off yet.

As for GNOME ... well, Gtk, which is what that is built on, is badly in need of a reworking, too:

"Imendio's developers argue that the GTK 2 series is a dead end because of the ABI stability guarantees and they say that a clean break will likely be necessary to continue moving forward because the code base contains a lot of legacy cruft and refactoring poses too many obstacles."

http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/reinventing-gtk.ars

The same article quotes one authority on Gtk who says that "current version of GTK makes it difficult to achieve pixel-precise control of software design, doesn't permit overlapping elements, and isn't conducive to creating rich visual effects." and another who states "one of the most significant limitations of GTK [is] that prevents development of richer user interfaces."

It doesn't sound like there's any immediate challenge to the Cocoa frameworks there.

"It hits me that if the BeOS was around and up to date today it would have a ready market and that there is a lot of heavy lifting going on that, while dramatically different from vendor to vendor, is all focused on accomplishing the same things."

I love the way Rob will use an example like this, and just because it is not Apple, it would be wildly successful. When it is Apple aiming for something outside its usual market, he would be pointing out how difficult it would be given the entrenched competitor or, in the case of operating systems, Apple is doomed to failure because of lack of market share which makes it impossible to get developers to write for the Mac, etc etc.

I really wish that he would also put a line of disclosure into his articles, because the way this is written, I have a feeling that Rob has options on a few million shares of Phoenix technologies.

Apr 21, 08 - 10:41 am Comment from: HMCIV

No sarcastic remark can possibly describe the horror I felt after reading this article. A little peace of my Powerbook died inside.

All these companies trying to copy Apple, they are copying where Apple has been not where they are going. Lately it is so obvious that Apple has a roadmap they are following, tying everything together to make their devices the perfect marriage of device you want, OS you need, and problems solved you did not know you had.

Apr 21, 08 - 10:43 am Comment from: Buster

.."I can't go into detail about who is doing what,..."

This sentence says it all, doesn't it?

Hi, I am Rob Enderle and I know that Apple is crap and that the PC industry is minutes away from destroying it completely. How?

Well, I can't go into detail about who is doing what...

"… no wonder they higher Rob and ilk to "advise" then as to what to do"

Do these companies drug Rob or did you mean "hire"?

Companies that hire Enderle just prove that his first name is a verb.

Desktop Linux is a long ways off, handheld and mobile linux you might already be using and not even know it.

The Death of MSFT by a thousand paper cuts has begun. Apple lead the way, and forced other manufacturers to dump windows in order to compete in usability. they are turning towards custom linux interfaces.

Good thing Apple is going to stand still, too. Huh Underle? Underling? Under armor? Whatever.

Peace.

relax guys, enderle is not a tech writer, he is a comedian, this is called sarcasm, he is just kidding, just like zune tang.

Apr 21, 08 - 11:09 am Comment from: Mac-nugget

This guy is so out of touch that I think MDN should not care what he says. Apple has been influencing industrial design since Jobs came back and Jonathan Ives took over the design team.

Remember the semi-transparent plastic fad that Apple setoff in the late 90's with the iMac design. This has been going on, and this idiot alludes to it like it's just taking place now.

The problem with all of these companies that have there sights set on Apple is that Apple's sights are set on the unknown, which means that Apple is busy innovating while the others are busy creating crappy copies. If and when the other companies do catch up with Apple, Apple will be far ahead with something new and unexpected (which the other companies will, no doubt, want to start copying).

That Zune is very snappy.

It's almost like Enderle has his own 'Reality Distortion Field', á la Steve Jobs.

The difference being, where Steve warps everybody's reality around him to believe in the greater-good (ie, Apple products), Rob just warps his own reality into believing M$ can produce barely adequate products.

He ought to give up on technology reporting and go into comedy – 'My Name Is (end)Erle' might end up being a huge shit!

Apr 21, 08 - 11:30 am Comment from: shen

"Phoenix Technologies has been working quietly and acquiring a number of companies to build a solution that is being offered and adopted by OEMs specifically designed exceed with Windows many of Apple's historic advantages. Ranging from virus resistance to synchronization between products to invisible migrations, each of the technologies Phoenix has quietly acquired appears to be secretly designed into the perfect Apple-beating tool set. Watch the future acquisitions this company makes closely because Apple appears to be its target, and its goal isn't to just beat Apple but to provide an offering that will make obsolete Apple's current advantages."

lol! reads like a stock scam spam.

watch Phoenix monday morning! already tripled in 3 days! this one is for real, buy now!

Apr 21, 08 - 11:36 am Comment from: Jubei

Perhaps MDN can start posting a running list of quotes and phrases that this so called expert has spouted over the years. You know the ones like the iMac is dangerous. During an earthquake it may fall and explode glass all over the place and kill you. LOL Another good one, the brown ( turd ) Zune is going to be the iPod Killer!!!

Rob & shen
"It's the OS stupid!"

Someone PLEASE tell me - Why do people leave those stupid stickers on.

First, because PC's are so damn ugly. You need stickers to dress the things up.

Second, have you ever tried to get those stickers OFF a PC? It's nearly impossible, short of wrecking the case. And just another example of how much thought (heh) PC makers put into their products.

This is like driving your car around for years with the faded and yellowing window sticker listing the feature/options/MSRP. They are supposed to be taken off after purchase.

I liken them more to people who still drive around with past presidential campaign decals on their cars. Nobody cares, except for the bad taste.

This is how intensely stupid analysts and even some of Apple's copmpetitors actually are...

This jackass thinks that changing the PACKAGING will indicate that the companies in question are concerned for the user experience? The PACKAGING?

Apple's packaging is an emergent property of it's design ethics and corporate culture. Jackasses like Enderle make statements like this because they honestly believe that good marketing is the only reason iPods and iPhones sell. They really believe people only buy them because they think iPods and iPhones are "cool". The simple fact is that Apple's products are considered "cool" because they JUST FUCKING WORK!

An example of the horseshit that Enderle and his analyst buddies are pushing is the Razr. That phone may have been warm poop for a few months, and everyone had one. But the software it ran was IDENTICAL to the E815 and almost every other Motorola phone at the time. The Razr did absolutely nothing new. It sold purely on it's looks and that was that. That's the kind of marketing Enderle and other halfwits think will save Apple's competitors, and that's why they are so very wrong.

So…

A global syndicate of third party companies (Phoenix—good one Rob—mythical bird rising from the ashes of Vista) is gonna waltz in and fix Vista in less than a year?
And all the PC makers will unite together to construct this tower of Babel that reaches to the PC heavens?
And Microsoft, the Beneficent, will lean over from his throne and give them all a big pat on back and say, "Well done, thou good and faithful servant."
And mankind will then join together, singing "Kum Ba Ya" while Apple is getting throttled in the marketplace, presumably being pummeled by lightning bolts cast down from this PC tower of Babel, as well as drowning in deluge of new, colorful, stickerless PC products.

Okay, then, many tribes over many centuries have invented various mythologies, but I think Rob made this one up all on his own.

Apr 21, 08 - 12:29 pm Comment from: Crabs

Wow, he really just doesn't get it, does he? He says all of these companies are going to out-Apple Apple, but you can't out-Apple Apple, because the things Apple does now that they're trying to outdo, Apple won't be doing those things anymore.

The only way to out-Apple Apple would be to completely ignore what Apple's doing, and create your own innovative and easy to use products, that look nothing like Apple products, and you interact with them differently. Why? Because Apple has patents on how you interact with their products. So all you can ever do is create a bad copy. So kind of what Samsung's doing with their "touch-free" interface. Will it pan out? Probably not. But at least they're taking a step in the right direction. Of course they're also taking a step in the wrong direction at the same time, with their iPhone knockoff.

I just really don't understand the mentality that some of these companies have. Oh, look, they're doing well, let's try and be just like them, and we'll do well too! It's like the American auto makers trying to be more like Toyota. Sorry folks, Toyota's been perfecting their products for 50 years, slowly but surely. You're not gonna catch up by copying them for 2 years, or for 5 years or for 15 years. You have to go back and start perfecting your own products, slowly refining them until they're worth something.

Apple's been perfecting their product for over 30 years. OS X for around 10 years. Slowly, but surely, they get rid of any problems, any imperfections, until you get an amazing product. You can't just copy it. You have to go back and start taking the bugs out of your product, and slowly, but surely, it will become a good product.

Oh, and they should probably ditch Vista. That'll help a ton.

Apr 21, 08 - 12:31 pm Comment from: TenaciousDNA

You only need to realize the truth... ...there is no spoon.

Rob Enderle does not write to inform or to present any facts, but to paint the appearance of industry knowledge in order to dupe people in a state of denial or ignorance into giving him large sums of money.

Once all of us here realize this (here at MDN), maybe we won't get so worked up in the forums, add hits to his site, and maybe, just maybe... HE'LL go BEYOND the cusp of going out of business.

It would also save us a lot of time and frustration.

Did no one notice Enderle's creepy section about his wife and GPS Snitch at the end of the article? Ugh, gross.