Rob Enderle To Replace Herniated Disc With Blu-ray Disc

[jkwest]

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I’ve long wondered why analysts who have such a poor record of predicting tech product winners and losers and revenue estimates continue to be quoted by the media as credible sources even when their information is as likely to be proven true as the headline on this blog.

Rob Enderle has not only missed forecasts more often than one would think could be missed even by someone with no knowledge of technology, there are questions he raises himself about his sometimes clear bias and stubborn support of specific companies from which he receives financial compensation.
(Full disclosure: We have said here from the beginning and clearly stated on this site that I am paid by a consortium of software and hardware companies backing this Blu-ray support site to conduct interviews, produce videos, and write blogs of my choosing without any censorship. I'm also a reporter, not an analyst.)

Even before Rob Enderle, in the early to mid-1990s the former Paul Kagan & Associates dished out (and sold and profited by) reports forecasting the imminent meteoric rise in pay-per-view revenues to billions and billions of dollars for cable companies. It never happened – 15 years later the entire PPV and video-on-demand industry finally hit the ONE billion dollar mark, years after the home video industry had soared past $20 billion.

Inexplicably to me, industry professionals continued to trust these people, they kept showing up to their conferences and they kept paying for their reports. So, we in the media continued to quote them.

Throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s, Kagan and other market analysts from California to Wall Street consistently predicted the imminent demise of the home video market and particularly rental retailers like Blockbuster at the hands of PPV and emerging electronic delivery technologies. That didn’t and still hasn’t happened.

These days Ron Enderle of the eponymously named Enderle Group has taken inaccurate analysis and perspective to a new level. But that's his privilege to do so for whatever reasons he may.

The question is: Where are the market forecast credentials that entice even high-profile publications to quote Ron Enderle as a credible resource on new technology?

A quick glance of his record shows that he:

• declared “HD-DVD Wins” in a December 2006 Technology Pundits column, a declaration that was never true at any point during the battle with Blu-ray.

• Stated emphatically in a Digital Trends column that same month that it “appears impossible” for Blu-ray to gain a substantial lead on HD DVD. Blu-ray did exactly that and a little more than a year later HD DVD threw in the towel.

• Told Reuters in February 2007 that Wal-Mart’s entry into digital movie downloads was “a game changer” that spelled “the beginning of the end for DVDs.” Less than a year later Wal-Mart shut down its movie downloading service.

• Wrote in a column for Digital Trends in April 2007 that “any studio wanting Wal-Mart’s support after year end had better be selling HD DVD movies. “Wal-Mart won’t be promoting Blu-Ray…” Shortly after year’s end Wal-Mart dropped HD DVD in favor of promoting Blu-ray exclusively.

• As late as August 27, 2007, in a TechNewsWorld column he said he had been predicting a Blu-ray victory all along and that “by this time HD-DVD would be toast” (huh?), but that now he was reversing course and proclaiming “Blu-ray: RIP” less than 6 months before HD DVD conceded victory to Blu-ray; that “Blu-ray may have effectively killed the PS3,” “Blu-ray simply can’t get there,” “Blu-ray can’t win,” and “it is reasonably obvious Blu-ray lost.”

• On January 10, 2008, just weeks before Toshiba officially dropped its HD DVD platform, Enderle defied all conventional wisdom by posting a column at ITBusinessEdge providing bullet point suggestions of how Toshiba’s HD DVD could still win the war against Blu-ray.

It’s tough predicting the future and a lot of people were wrong about HD DVD, but Enderle’s self-appointed job and his frequent quotes should require that he be accurate, at least most of the time. He doesn’t have to make such specific and declarative forecasts unless he's just trying to draw attention to himself and be quoted. His support of Toshiba's HD DVD has been fanboy-like, while most other analysts provided a more objective, balanced, and less absolute forecast.

One hopes Enderle’s bullheaded support of Toshiba doesn’t lie in the fact that, according to the bio on his own web site, he sits on the Advisory Council for Toshiba.

Despite missing almost every forecast in the Blu-ray / HD DVD battle, he still seems determined to denigrate the viability of Blu-ray in the face of much evidence to the contrary. Just this week in a Home Media Magazine story noting that Blu-ray revenues are already overtaking digital movie downloads after less than one full year in the market following the demise of HD DVD, Enderle is quoted dismissing the data and suggesting it is all little more than spin by the “blu-ray marketing organization.”

Again, it sounds more like the bitter loser rhetoric of a fanboy on a forum than legitimate analysis.

If Enderle’s off-target projections were limited to HD DVD and Blu-ray, he might even be given a bit of a pass, but his forecasts and favoritism have been off and called into question for years. In various articles you will find him predicting that HP’s iPod will outsell Apple’s iPod, commenting candidly in a 2006 InformationWeek column about being unavoidably biased towards vendors that are also his clients, and articles disclosing that Enderle was indeed biased or did not disclose in articles about Microsoft and Dell products in The New York Times and elsewhere as recently as last August that he was a paid consultant for those companies.

Hey, I've freely admitted in multiple columns that I was wrong in thinking that DVDs would never replace the videocassette but I never sold or even declared my gut feeling at the time and wasn't quoted predicting DVDs would fail. I've had enough misjudgments that I would hate for someone to list them all here as I am doing with Enderle. But I am not an analyst and I am not holding myself out as someone who makes forecasts of the future.
I don't know Rob Enderle and I am not suggesting that he isn't free to say whatever he chooses.

I'm suggesting that when picking experts and analysts to quote, perhaps we in the media are too lazy about finding the best sources. Perhaps we should hold analysts to the fire; go back once in awhile and report on their forecasts. Or at least check their veracity periodically rather than continuing to rely on the same names.
Maybe Rob Enderle is a good place to start.

Nice ending!!! Enderle needs to be put out to pasture...IMO..