BBC blows it: Calls Rob Enderle ‘independent’ during Windows 7 demo failure

Rob Enderle is President and Principal Analyst of the “Enderle Group,” a group of two which consists of Rob and his wife Mary. If they had a dog it’d likely be a group of three, but then, of course, Rob wouldn’t be principal analyst any longer.

So, what’s new with Rob? Well, the BBC News, in their finite wisdom, has decided to interview Enderle about Microsoft’s Windows 7. The Beeb’s Rory Cellan-Jones identifies Rob Enderle as an “Independent Pundit,” and gets right down to the task of demonstrating Vista SP3… er, Windows 7 on an HP “TouchSmart” PC (a sardonically-named product as we’re about to see).

“Independent Pundit” Rob Enderle has worked for and with companies like, oh, Microsoft and HP and also currently sits on HP’s advisory council. This is public information that took us 5.7 seconds to find online that is, nonetheless, obviously “news” to Cellan-Jones and the Beeb, hapless dolts that they are.

Without further ado, let’s watch Rob demonstrate the marvelous wonder of “multi-touch” in Windows 7 (by the way, Multi-touch™ is a trademark of Apple Inc.):

See the full video via BBC News here.

Marvelous wonder? “Ponderous blunder” is more like it. This particular Microsoft copy of Apple innovation works about as well as — maybe even better than — we’d expect.

Of course, Enderle also forgets that – or lies about – the fact that Apple has offered Multi-Touch™ Macs for quite some time now. First with the MacBook Air and now across the entire MacBook family. And Apple has done it the correct way – on a spacious trackpad, not on a vertical screen where users arms would quickly tire in what everyone — everyone outside of HP and Microsoft, that is — calls “Gorilla Arm.”

See Apple’s Multi-Touch™ in action: swipe, zoom, rotate, and secondary click. There are more gestures than just those four, but you get the idea. Apple’s Multi-Touch™ actually works.

For what it’s worth, the Beeb’s full article is here.

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “Paul in the U.K.” and “Chas” for the heads up.]

57 Comments

  1. I love the way the interviewer says “Vista” – sort of managing to spit and sneer at the same time.

    Nice of M$ to rip off Apple’s user interface yet again. Wanna bet Steve J. won’t settle for a mere $500M to settle the patent infringement suit that’s going to come out of this? More likely he ends up owning M$ – then he can shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.

  2. To call the BBC responsible journalist is like calling hip hop and rap great entertainment.

    As for Enderle and his “group,” I had a cousin that once said that if we were to call a dog’s tail a leg, how many legs would the dog have?
    The answer is still four.

    The same goes with Enderle and his so called group.

    Windows 7. It’s still Vista.™

  3. The BBC are destroying years of hard won reputation by this continuing shameless demonstration of cronyism. Only yesterday they had an article on cloud computing leaving it till Microsoft made their belated entry to something that Google and others have been doing for years to inform us of its significance. At least they left in the comment from Google stating it to be insignificant in the great scheme of things, for some semblance of balance, but their reporting on technology these days seems to be somewhat dictated by MS’s marketing schedule despite previous warnings from the Governors about their excessive brown nosing of all things Redmond.

  4. Gee, their “multi-touch” is broken?
    Big surprise there.

    Why would you want to reach up and move things around on screen? For a kiosk? Sure. But to actually work on at your desk? Your arms would go numb. And the fingerprints. Nice.

    Enderle’s screen would be smeared with grease from all the McDonald’s fries he clearly wolf’s down.

  5. People are fairly dumb in general though.

    These demos of Windows 7 annoy me because even though an intelligent person can see them as a bad copy of Apple’s ideas and a somewhat senseless implementation of them, the average dummy won’t at all.

    If Apple doesn’t get some kind of multi-touch system out the door (that’s bigger than a phone), before Windows 7 hits next year, Microsoft will have a “genuine advantage” that’s actually a genuine advantage.

  6. You should watch the full clip. It is a bit better quality than YouTube. Look closely, when the reporter is talking the intro, how a guy behind him is struggling to get the screen to respond to his touch gestures. He keeps touching, pressing, dragging, the machine chooses to respond only whenever it damn well pleases. Just priceless!

    And further on, our favourite punching bag claims that Win 7 is a ‘maintenance release’. He goes on to say that they won’t change much ‘the plumbing’, but will incorporate all those Vista complaints from OEM partners and users and for the most part, that’s what MS did. He says that the reaction of the developers was that this was what Vista should have looked like. In other words, our ‘independent’ analyst claims that MS will finally get Vista right some 10 years after it begun its development.

  7. Absolutely pitiful. I hope Apple follows through on their word that they will defend their iPhone and Multi-touch patents vigorously.

    And what a douche this asshole is… “a company that’s named after a fruit.” Is he that insecure and delusional where he can’t even refer to Apple by name?

  8. “Gorilla arm” plus hours of the monitor accumulating sweat and dirt from your fingers…I don’t think it’s a good idea.

    You would spend a lot of time cleaning the screen so you could make a good contact.

  9. What stupid player does BBC uses???/
    it pauses every 2 seconds, if you pause it manually to have more buffer, it does not load more video, the “rewind” key delete what’s on the buffer. You can not move manually to any part of the video.

    There goes another$10,000 to Rob from microsoft….

  10. I really hope Apple have the multitouch tightly patented because it would be great if they were able to get M$ to have to remove a feature.

    I don’t quite get the point of MT on a big screen. Nice as a gimmick but wouldn’t ones arms ache if you were to do that all the time. Plus the fingerprints would get really annoying after a while.

    Apple approach is different. MT is on the mouse pad which makes a lot more sense.

  11. The only time multi-touch even comes close to not working on an iPhone is if an app itself takes a moment to respond due to the power of the device, or if the button is too small or something. This thing is running on a new machine with a nice big screen and massively more powerful hardware…. And it doesn’t work even remotely as well, it’s not even in the same league. Any actual response to multi-touch could just be a system error for all we know.

  12. …this is lame…

    “Is it a major step forward?” – “Yes it is, it’s called a maintenance release”
    so: like OSX 10.x.y to 10.x.(y+1) – something we tend to get for free every now and then, installs and just works? But I wouldn’t call it ‘a major step forward’, certainly not adding immediately after that “they haven’t worked at the plumbing” – which they better should have worked at the plumbing first. It’s like repainting your walls while water pours through them, and hoping that the paint will hold the water…

    Wow, am I excited that I get to wait another full year to see this in the shop…

  13. Don’t count on a good lawsuit against anyone. Remember the last LS against MS punished MS and had them give hundreds of thousands of $$ to education in the form of free software. Not exactly the best scenario for Apple.

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