Clearly not content with being unmercifully knocked clear out of the MP3 player ring, Dell, like a punch-drunk tomato can, is once again considering climbing back into the ring.
Rob Enderle writes for TechNewsWorld, “The MP3 player market, while dominated by Apple, has just a fraction — albeit a large one — of the phone market’s potential. This suggests that the way to beat Apple is not to go after Apple customers but to go after those who don’t currently use MP3 players. That’s actually a bigger number — and that was the way Apple beat Creative Labs and Rio in the first place.”
Enderle writes, “What Dell believes, and I agree, is that folks don’t want to spend lots of time managing music — they just want to listen to it. The fact that few refresh the music on their iPods is a clear indicator that there is untapped potential here, even with iPod owners. The market appears to be looking for something more flexible, more automatic, and more focused on enjoyment than on individual music purchases.”
MacDailyNews Take: That paragraph sums up nicely what comes out of a bull’s back end. It’s also a typical over-thought, wishful fantasy concocted by losers who are drenched in corporate-think, afflicted with corporate-speak, and who have absolutely no idea what the hell they’re doing.
Enderle continues, “The leading non-iTunes music services — Sirius/XM, Pandora, Rhapsody, Slacker and Amazon (note: no Dell partners have yet been announced) — all provide advantages over iTunes. Still, none makes it easy enough to move between services and the various channels and devices people want to use to consume music.”
MacDailyNews Take: Most of these “leading non-iTunes music services” seem to be able to do two things that Apple’s iTunes Store can’t: maintain general invisibility and rapidly dispose of capital.
Enderle continues, “Dell’s effort has Zing, a technology company it acquired a while back, at its core. The key to success is not the device (though to avoid the Zune mistake, if there is a device, it had better be small, cool and inexpensive), but the cloud-based service . It has to provide more choices among better services — while containing complexity and creating a great user experience — to be successful. It can be done; we’ll know in a few months whether Dell can do it. I’m not sure I’d bet against Michael Dell.”
Full article, Think Before You Click™, here.
MacDailyNews Take: Nowhere in the article does Rob Enderle disclose, as reported by The Wall Street Journal last Wednesday, that he has been hired by Dell to consult on MP3 players and music “strategy” in general. Enderle also fails to mention that Dell’s vice president of consumer sales, Michael Tatelman, has yet to decide how to proceed with this new music player idea and that he may decide not to do anything at all (but we hope he does, for the laughs).
Luckily for Enderle, it’s impossible for him to lose any credibility, as he had none to begin with.
Contact: http://www.ectnews.com/perl/contact_form.pl
[Attribution: MacUser. Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “RadDoc” for the heads up.]
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Rob Enderle is a total hack.
You know though competition is good. In all likelihood the Zune probably helped Apple more than it hindered it.
Rob Enderle – “Music consultant”….
Oh – mu
Laughing hysterically……
………………………………
I think Rob Enderle is out of his league. The difference is that Steve Jobs is a visionary Rob Enderle is a journalist he has an associates degree in Merchandising? WTF? Steve has nothing to worry about – Steve Jobs probably views the technology industry as a chess board while Rob Enderle is playing tic-tac-toe and doesn’t know the differences between X’s and O’s. You can almost hear Steve Jobs laughing from California…Saying good job Michael Dell – you now have to consult a journalist to help “innovate” your company…AAHAHHAH!
hmmm, thx Rob… i will short Dell stock (again)
ROTFFLMFAO!
Zing?!
Enderle!?
Dell?!
This has GOT be a joke. Is Michael Dell on crack?
Zing. I do not frickin believe that anyone would be so frickin DUMB as to call anything by the name Zing.
Are ALL the big corporations this stupid?
Yep.
Reading the article before the disclosure, I had already come to the conclusion that this was indeed Enderle’s coaching which probably led into Dell thinking they “can do it!” in the first place. Now that Dell has committed money and resources to these devices, what else can Enderle do but regurgitate the same over-exagerated insights and fantasy To-Do-List (i.e. requesting Shakespeare from monkeys with a deadline) to the press?
This will be entertaining.
“What Dell believes, and I agree, is that folks don’t want to spend lots of time managing music — they just want to listen to it…”
NO shit, it’s called a RADIO.
Know This: When Enderle is involved in commenting on technology, it means it is a market Apple can crush or take over, or ignore altogether.
Companies like Dell need consultants and focus groups ad-noisome, because they have no taste, no feel, for what someone will want.
Look at Redmond, they focus-grouped the Zune (like everything else they do) to death. In the end, they truly believed they had a huge winner. It ended up bring a brown turd in a toilet…
I must admit, in many emails with Rob, he is actually a nice guy. The point for him is simple. He has made a living milking the massive and slothy companies as a consultant.
This is all good for Rob, as he makes an absolute killing listening to what they say, then in turn, repeating back to them what they want to here. He is a true master at this. Then he blogs and gives the tech industry a nugget of hope for his client he just worked for. It’s brilliant.
Now looking at Rob’s track record against Apple, would you for even a dime have him consult for you and have him give you advice?
You can say Rob is an absolute moron for saying he would not bet against Michael Dell vs. Steve Jobs (because that is basically what he just said), and from our perspective you’d be right – he’s an absolute moron for saying such.
But consider he knows full well his audience is Michael Dell and those that work for him, and suddenly his ego-fulfilling mantra is brilliant! He clearly knows who butters his bread.
In the end, when this thing fall apart and becomes a joke, Rob will move to a few points of weakness that where out there. It had iTunes to contend with, which may not yield. The company may need to make quick changes to stay ahead of the game (whatever that means), and it has to connect correctly with the crowd it is aiming for or it will be over with quickly (yes, please sound more like Obama stating the problems very intelligently, but brining nothing in the way of specifics in how to fix the current problems to the table)…
Rob is a brilliant guy who found his living on the shores of the 1990’s. As long as those companies survive, so will Rob.
They will row uphill against Apple at an increasing rate in the next 5 years, but they will still be there, and so will Rob.
Well, I guess it’s too late for this clods career to end early.
April Fool’s!!!!!…. not.
The result of Enderle leading Dell’s charge into music, will be HP’s boardroom cheering as Dell slides into bankruptcy.
Go Rob!
Well, the reason I don’t refresh the music on my iPod very often is because I like the music on my iPod. That’s why it’s on my iPod.
Rob Enderle is walking a fine line writing as a tech and market expert about projects he’s involved in without stating he’ involved in them. It’s fine to be greedy, but stupid greedy is what gets people in trouble. One must assume he told the editors he’s involved with this project.
@Me in LA
I had the exact same thought. So, this is a player that picks its songs on its own? What the hell is the point? That sounds just like satellite radio to me.
Oh, I know. You tell it what genre you like. Because genres don’t overlap or anything.
What is personal about a personal music player that picks music for large groups of people?
This is just dumber than dumb.
why is this a think before you click? the macuser article is well-written and makes fun of rob enderle.
to: Steven – This is Brilliant!
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that’s a cheap shot against Obama, even though I’m not his fan either, but smart politicians and journalists make their living talking to clueless people, what do you really expect, straight answers? (no soup for you)
When I actually think about Enderle, I like him simply because he’s playing the game to win, for his wife, his kids, his home, and his future. Who I don’t like is Mike Dell. He’s already mega rich, how dumb is he to hire a ‘yes man’ journalist that everyone already knows is on the take?
Windows is a microcosm of the real world, the uninformed masses in the Matrix. And then came the Terminators.
Let’s see:
face detection advanced from the consumer camera level
+
AI advanced from the consumer game level
+
stair climbing, jogging humanoid robots (Honda Asimo)
=
Engadget’s theoretical rogue killer bots by 2015,
with no one seeing this coming at all.
Why doesn’t Enderle predict that?
@ABQ Peter – the TBYC link – is for Rob’s self-penned article: technewsworld.com -just fyi
You know, it seems to me that this mention on MacDailyNews is just about the only publicity that Dell can expect to get for their next failed music player.
-jcr
TechNewsWorld editorial corrections page:
http://www.ectnews.com/perl/contact_form.pl?to=corrections
MDN, don’t knock the Sirius. It is the greatest road trip invention ever to be placed in a car.
Don’t knee-jerk and insult actual products that are very popular SUCH AS PANDORA which is on Apple’s iPhone app store and is quite popular. It’s a great service.
Ironically, I think Apple is going to kill this whole market over the next few years (maybe even months!) the ipod is going to become the ipod touch and thus a real touchscreen pocket sided video playing computer.
Dell is following MS’ mistake in that thinking the closed and single purpose nature of the ipod was its success. In fact it was Apple’s instinct for knowing what hardware technology would support and making it easy to use.
The future in such devices begins with having an OS… hey Dell, got one?
he doesn’t doesn’t even mention emusic in his list of other services shows that he either has his head so far up his own ass that he could never hear any music anyway, or his head is so far up the record industry’s ass as to make his opinions on music completely worthless.
What worries me a little is that usually the gray dull people usually win in the end, through sheer perseverance. There’s no sign of them weakening and sooner or later the zombies are going to go for one of these ‘solutions’.
Actually the point made by “yet another steve” is exactly why Dell is going to do this. They think Apple is going to leave behind a big part of the market by moving to all touch iPods. Where do I get that idea from? From a conversation I overheard by a Dell rep (who else would wear a Dell logo shirt and talk about how great a corporate platform Dell is), the intent is to offer a 32-64gig device that supports most of the non-Apple services in a combo offline (from storage) or online ala Sirius/XM portable. That would not be much of a concern until I heard the price target is $100 for the hardware and the $10-20 per month SAS (Software As a Service) is how they expect to make money in the long run (a custom OS for the unit made by one of the companies that Dell bought). Supposedly the record (whores… opps that’s) companies and some studios are on board. $100 for a 32gig device will sadly sell to the “For Dummies” crowd because the Best Buy guy said it was a better deal than a iPod, so much cheaper.
Lesson to Dell guy in LA, don’t sit in a mall food court and tell your buddy everything.
I’ll take that bet.