“Not everyone’s convinced Apple Computer’s chief executive Steve Jobs will get away from the company’s current options grant drama unscathed,” Tiernan Ray blogs for Barron’s Online.

Ray reports, “Rob Enderle, Principal Analyst with technology research firm Enderle Group, in San Jose, California… thinks no one is taking this week’s Apple rumors seriously enough. ‘The stuff that’s being discussed now raises questions of criminal charges,’ for Jobs, says Enderle. And he thinks Jobs’s character and personality, as demonstrated over the years, are at the heart of the current drama.”

Ray reports, “In Enderle’s view, the two articles that have surfaced this week concerning Apple’s options grants, first from The Recorder, yesterday, and then today in the Financial Times, are both news, and they are both probably accurate.”

“The accounts of falsified documents both ‘fit within the behavior framework of what the real Steve Jobs is like,’ opines Enderle. ‘He has a history of not being particularly honest in regards to matters of finance,’ says Enderle. Enderle cites as examples of Jobs’s character various incidents in Jobs’s long career, such as his cheating of pal Steve Wozniak out of money in the early days before Apple Computer, his attempts to get then-CEO John Scully fired after bringing him aboard Apple in the ’80s, and his pushing out Gil Amelio when Apple acquired Jobs’s company NeXT in the ’90s,” Ray reports.

Ray reports, “Concludes Enderle: ‘Whenever you have falsification of documents and they’re tied to the CEO, it’s then very difficult to separate the CEO from the matter. It raises the question can he even be at Macworld’ in January, Apple’s annual kick-off event where the company usually announces new products. ‘Still,’ he says, ‘If there’s anyone who could survive this situation, it may be Jobs.’”

Full article here.

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader "Barry" for the heads up.]
According to the Enderle Group website, “For over 20 years Rob has worked for and with companies like Microsoft, HP, IBM, Dell, Toshiba, Gateway, Sony, USAA, Texas Instruments, AMD, Intel, Credit Suisse First Boston, GM, Ford, ROLM, and Siemens.” Note the lack of Apple Computer, NeXT, and/or Pixar among the companies in Enderle’s list. Does Rob Enderle, who last year laughably proclaimed that “Microsoft wrote the first MacOS,” have any firsthand knowledge of the events he mentions to assail Steve Jobs’ character? Has Rob Enderle ever even met Steve Jobs? Enderle’s pathological opinions, which sound to us as if they were formed by reading unauthorized Steve Jobs biographies at best, aren’t worth a bucket of warm spit.

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