today’s grammar lesson: rob enderle
It’s generally not worth one’s time to point out that Rob Enderle is wrong about something. Enderle, for those of you who don’t know, is one of those “technology analysts” who gets paid to “consult” on the current trends and future directions of the technology industry. Why anyone would pay for his services is beyond me. Enderle is so frequently wrong about the market, misguided in his predictions, and fallacious in his analysis that I’d need to start a whole new website just to accurately catalogue the various mistakes he’s made and lies he’s told over the years.
So I’m not going to waste time debunking the substance (if you can call it that) of his recent article on the JooJoo, and how it spells doom for the Apple Tablet. Oh, you’ve never heard of the JooJoo? It started as the CrunchPad, a mythical tablet computer that the blog kings over at TechCrunch dreamed up. They partnered with a group called Fusion Garage to make this dream a reality, weird drama ensued, and Fusion Garage abandoned Tech Crunch to release the device without them, rebranding it as the JooJoo. Enderle posits that the negative press surrounding the JooJoo is going to badly damage the Apple Tablet’s reception, because Apple’s “secret sauce” is its ability to make us look at products with fresh eyes, and Apple has never released a product so close to the poor debut of a very similar product.
If you can’t see why that analysis is hilariously wrong, I strongly doubt that you and I are friends. You can point out logical errors in Enderle’s argument starting with the title (hint: the Apple Tablet does not officially exist). Writing a full rebuttal would probably kill me. Instead, I’d like to examine the unique horribleness of Enderle’s writing style. Again, it’s not hard. Try the very first sentence on for size:
“The concept of a large tablet device capable of many interesting things goes back to before the Newton but it was the Apple Newton that first captured our imagination that a device like this is possible.”
Huh? I’ve read the essays of college freshmen who can do better than this. Students barely pulling a 2.0, mind you. A competent writer might revise the sentence thusly:
The concept of a large tablet device capable of doing many interesting things goes back to before the Apple Newton, but it was the Apple Newton that first captured our imagination gave us the first inkling that a device like this is was possible.
This isn’t even the best possible revision, but it’s probably truest to Enderle’s original structure. Moving on to the article’s second sentence:
Apple, with its iPod Touch and iPhone, has recently done more with the tablet format with the iPod Touch and iPhone then than any other vendor. but The jury is still largely out on this format, with challenging devices from RIM, Palm, and Google often showcasing that keyboards are necessary. [Last clause deleted due to factual incorrectness. If anything, consumer satisfaction surveys show that some people like a software keyboard, and some like a hardware keyboard. But the enormous success of the iPhone demonstrates that hardware keyboards are not "necessary".]
In fact, one could rightly argue that the jury is anything but “out” on the success of the touchscreen format, and therefore delete the entire second half of the excerpt above. Virtually every sentence cries out for revision, but I think just one more will do:
…in both cases [Apple's] devices were seen as unique and different and by stepping away from the baggage of what came before they found a willing audience and success.
And while writing this, Rob went to get a cup of coffee and then a bagel and then he had to use the bathroom so he went and used the bathroom and sat down and continued writing and had a lot of money and success from his punditry and genius.
Rob Enderle is the Sarah Palin of the technology world, minus all the fun jokes about the front-door view of Russia.
I got that Sarah Palin vibe, too.
Does Enderle have any coherent trains of thought? Does he dictate this stuff during a fever dream?
Does TG Daily have any editors? Or dignity?
What does a polarizing political figure have to do with a hack who no one takes seriously? And if you believe the latter applies to the former, you haven’t been paying attention to the polls. Half of your fellow Americans are proving that belief fallacious.
Yes, and by definition, half of all Americans are below average too ;-)
“Rob Enderle is the Sarah Palin”
Heh. After reading the first sentence, I thought, “Add ‘also’ to the end and you’d have Sarah Palin.”
@instig8r: it has to do with bad English
Don’t forget about this gem:
As has been widely covered the JooJoo (which sounds way to (sic) close to JewJew…
Any 6th grader should be able to tell the difference between too, to, and two, but not our Rob.
A nonsensical tech pundit has everything to do with a nonsensical politician in this context. Neither one seems to be capable of stringing two intelligible thoughts together. If we were having a discussion on something like gynecology then I would agree with you that one has little do with the other. In this case, if you were to read what Enderle writes, and read some of the things that Palin says, you might conclude they have the same speech writer. The fact that one of these figures happens to have found the right combination of ridiculous sayings and batting of eyelashes to convince people to vote for her while the other is relatively obscure to the general public does not change the fact that the comparison is appropriate in this case.
Well, since we’re criticizing people’s English here, there’s no such word as “thusly” — “thus” is already an adverb.
It’s one thing for an article to be poorly written, but this has grammar mistakes highschool students would catch. How could anyone publish this? Nevermind his ludicrous argument…
Yes, and by definition, half of all Americans are below average too ;-)
Ooh sorry to get picky here (although given the subject of the blog post, maybe it’s appropriate) but the definition of average is not “half way”.
For example, imagine the ages of several cats were 1, 1.5, 2, 0.5, 2 and 10, then the average age would be 2.83, therefore six of the seven cats would be below average :P
Nice work. One improvement though: change “goes back to before the Apple Newton” to “predates the Apple Newton.”
I love the idea of something being both “unique and different.”
Thanks for the much-needed copy edit on Rob Enderle’s latest post. There are so many ways his writing can be cringe-inducing, but I usually get so caught up in the “substance” that I forget to look at the style. Well done.
I had a go at criticizing Enderle’s post on my own blog too, though I think along the way I ended up veering off into Enderle’s own territory. I actually think he’s right about the likely fate of the JooJoo. But I think the main reason it WON’T affect Apple is because right now I still don’t believe Apple is MAKING a tablet. And if they are, I think everyone who’s been speculating about it is way off the mark and will be shocked by what eventually comes out of Cupertino.
Fun fisking, but you may want to correct your own spelling error. You spell TechCrunch correctly in the first use but incorrectly as Tech Crunch in the second. Regardless, thanks.
I don’t know anything about the tech world from a market standpoint, but I’m wondering if Enderle is looking to uproot the traditional writing style of forecasters and pundits in this field. Maybe he’s moving to a more Faulkner-esque stream-of-consciousness style that provides a more emotional experience to the reader? If he starts to leave out apostrophes, then I’ll know that’s his direction for certain.
@Migrant: Please see my footer.
@Jonathan: regarding the definition of “average”, that would depend on what is being measured, and how many people are in the average. Given the large sample size you’d get from “Americans,” @Kai is probably correct.
@Michael Leddy: I thought about using “predates,” but I wanted to preserve as much of Enderle’s voice as possible.
Another pick, though, one Jonathan to another, is that your revision of “the concept of a large tablet device capable of many interesting things” to “the concept of a large tablet device capable of doing many interesting things” is incorrect.
“Capable of many things” is perfectly acceptable, the verb “doing” being redundant (especially as you could argue that the device itself is not “doing” anything).
I’d probably also argue that it should be “a device like this were possible” as it’s past subjunctive ;-)
The key to Enderle’s success would appear, to me, based on the fact that many journalists have never bothered to check into what is in fact “The Enderle Group.” Which, no doubt, is made up of Enderle, his wife and possibly his dog (who knows more about tech than the other two put together.)
@Jonathan – mmm, I wouldn’t be so sure about that. For example, assuming we’re talking about IQ… It only takes a few super IQs to skew the distribution to the right and given the high number of grads and (legal) immigrants in the US with professional and postgrad qualifications, I’d be willing to bet that more than half of the US population is below average.
But bear in mind my pick was at the use of the term “by definition”. It may be that on average, most measures of average split large data sets in half. But that’s a hypothesis, not a definition.
Among the many ideas that have never really permeated Enderle’s skull? The one where Apple makes nicely designed hardware, then makes nicely designed software to go with it, thereby creating a good experience. That’s the reason for the success of the iPod and the iPhone, Rob.
So, Enderle doesn’t understand Apple (or pretends not to, as Gruber points out), and he’s parlayed that into a nice little career. We should all be so lucky.
@Jonathan: While your are correct the for small populations (in the statistical sense not the literal sense) the median and the mean are not equal in value, for very large populations that are shown to be normally distributed(like IQ of residents of the US), the median and mean are the same for all intents and purposes. Look up the Normal or Gaussian Distribution and get schooled. So whether or not he knew this was correct or just lucky in ignorance, he was indeed correct.
Enderle doesn’t write–he spews. Little wonder then that the result is poorly formed. Your very analysis here gave him exactly what he most craves: links and eyes.
I knew I should have stopped reading after seeing those double non-breaking spaces after each sentence. Did he write that on a typewriter? Those hideous gaps made him sound like Forrest Gump in my mind as I was reading the article.
Then there’s this little gem in the first paragraph of his Wrapping Up section:
“we should all suspend out disbelief”
Suspend it out? What, over a gorge or something?
@daniel: I am intimately familiar with the Gaussian distribution, trust me. I just didn’t want to get bogged down in the details of the one comment. ;-)
(But since opinions on certain Alaskan political celebrities are highly polarized, a normal distribution is somewhat less likely, making the median a better choice. All a bit beside the point, though.)
@Kawika: Damn. I knew someone was going to notice that.
I have developed a webapp dedicated to collecting copy mistakes and suggestions like these. It is at http://emend.appspot.com, and I invite any and all to use it.
@daniel: a lot of things in societies do not have a normal distribution. Take age, take income. However, for soft properties like language skills, any distribution shape is somewhat arbitrary since one cannot measure them in hard numbers.
I just don’t get it. How does this guy make a living doing this? I keep wondering whether it could be some scam, where he is (pathetically) trying to act like an IT consultant to cover up some other activity. Is he secretly kicking back part of his consultant fees to the company official under the table? Is he good at arranging for hookers and blow at the out of town conferences? Does he have “the dirt” on some powerful Microsoft executive and is blackmailing him to force them to hire him? I can’t believe that so many IT industry executives are stupid enough to listen to what he says, much less pay him for the advice. He must really be a top-notch smoozer in person.
Yes, it’s fun to poke fun at Enderle’s endless idiocy, but wouldn’t it be even better if we didn’t quote him, didn’t talk about him, and didn’t link to his stupid articles? Aren’t we just giving him what he wants – a soapbox in the spotlight?
I’d prefer that he just fade away into nothingness by being ignored by the Web collective as he rightly deserves.
Please – let’s stop feeding this troll. (Wait, “troll” is too kind…)
Rob Enderle is just a character like Borat or Bruno. One day he will take off the Mission Impossible -style mask and underneath? Ronald Wayne, 3rd founder of Apple, Inc. who sold out for $800 after only 2 weeks.
Palin is ignorant, small-minded, and bigoted. Enderle is incompetent. I think there’s a difference.
although I do agree, there is definitely something palin-esque about how he crams about three difference sentences into one and appears to be allergic to commas.
I’d like to point out that I made the Palin/Enderle connection in June.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mhale0/3633507228/
“there’s no such word as “thusly” ”
It’s hard to defend that claim, since it is an utterance, it is uttered, it is a collection of letters, it is written, and it has a meaning. Moreover, it is listed in the American Heritage Dictionary. To me, that makes it a word, whether or not synonyms exist.
True, it’s frowned on by Miss Thistlebottom, and original uses appear to have been chiefly humorous, but going by a long entry in Merriam Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, it has acquired usage rather distinct from the principal uses of “thus”: ” ‘Thusly’ appears to be appreciably more common than ‘thus’ when the adverb follows the verb and precedes a colon. … whatever its origins, ‘thusly’ is not now merely an ignorant or comic substitute for ‘thus’: it is a distinct adverb that is used in a distinct way in standard speech and writing.”
(Personally, I wouldn’t touch it, but it *is* a word.)
Enderle is delightfully entertaining — the Sarah Palin comparison is apt indeed for that very reason — but, as someone else has pointed out, please avoid “thusly”. Despite another commenter’s misguided protestations to the contrary, hair-splitting aside, it is not actually a word.
I’m sorry, I must be coming late to the party, I assumed Rob was kind of a ‘Fake Steve Jobs’ parody of an analyst.
I mean this at the bottom of his page
“Rob Enderle is one of the last Inquiry Analysts. Inquiry Analysts are paid to stay up to date on current events and identify trends and either explain the trends or make suggestions, tactical and strategic, on how to best take advantage of them. Currently he provides his services to most of the major technology and media companies. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the writer.”
You mean he’s not intentionally trying to be funny
While I strongly support knocking down Enderle (what a maroon!) I have to disagree, stylistically, with one edit that you made. Devices can be capable of interesting things.
“Doing” here isn’t doing anything. A computer computes, it doesn’t do. A search engine searches, it doesn’t do. A device devices… well, you get the point. “Doing” is a busy word when added to this particular sentence.
All your other critiques are spot-on though. (And don’t visit my blog, you’re not invited.)
How, I wonder, can a jury be largely out?
But the highlight of the piece, for me, is this bravura display of metaphor mixing: “it approaches the market using what should be an unsuccessful path and its messy birth may effectively sour the well for the Apple tablet”
“It was the Apple Newton, the obvious precursor of today’s tablet-based devices, that initially captured our imaginations, even though it wasn’t the first device of its kind.”
Fixed it for you.
It seems that we’re missing an obvious point. Enderle must be paid by the word. It doesn’t seem to matter if it is cogent, factual, or merely the equivalent of monkeys with typewriters.
Re teh gerbil:
To paraphrase SNL “Robbie you ignorant slut!”
Famous Rob Enderle quote: “I give SCO a 50 to 65 % chance of success.”