Why oh why does anybody ask Rob Enderle about anything?

I was enjoying this article about a grad student's plans for a $12 computer until the Rob Enderle quote showed up on page 2. His appearance in an article or the sound of his voice on a 'Marketplace' segment is the signal to stop reading or listening. This 2002 (2002!) posting from Dave Winer explains it as well as anything:

Michael Williams: "That guy has always struck me as all hat and no cattle. Drives me nuts to see him quoted as an 'expert.' I'd be shocked if he's ever installed anything more than Windows on a laptop or written any code other than pseudo in an e-mail."

John Robb: "The guy is a carpetbagger quotemill of the worst sort. Nobody ever called him on it until today."

Joe Rotello: "Why don't we just replace him with a large switch marked OFF, and be done with it."

Assembly-line journalism

Got a couple of emails from Enderle, unfortunately he doesn't want them on the Web. They were long. I would love to publish them. See how the mind of a quote mill works. 1300 quotes per year. I guess he counts. Anyway, he's not that interesting. I hope Cydney writes a piece about this. And I also hope she keeps developing sources who know what they're talking about and avoids assembly-line journalism.

Actually according to this JargonWatch article on workbench, Enderle was the original quote mill. He's the DJ Kool Herc of sloppy tech journalism. The first of his kind.

Seeing as the article mentioned earlier was from ABC, we can maybe understand some newbie journalist not doing any kind of homework and thinking Enderle is some kind of authority on something, but you'd think a tech type company like Dell would know better. No such luck.

In other news, Dell has hired moron-hack-hall-of-famer Rob Enderle of "the Enderle Group" (also known as Rob and his Wife) to consult on their sure-to-fail iPod+iTunes competitor. Man, they sure are getting taken for a ride by this idiot.

and

That's astonishing. Michael Dell must have a screw loose somewhere. It could be a good thing, though, in the sense that it might shut down the "Enderle Quote Mill" that consistently spews out the most incorrect propaganda the Interwebs have ever seen. Who's going to go to him now? If he's on the DELL payroll, how can he pretend to be objective in his "anal-ysis"?

Enderle. DELL. BWAHAHAHAHAHA

Rob gained a bit of fame in the hysterical hyperbole arena for comparing Linux users to terrorists in this really awesome tour de force of bad writing and bad logic fusing together like 'Wonder Twin Powers, ACTIVATE!' - 'Pros, Priests, and Zealots: The 3 Faces Of Linux'.

When he's not being wrong about Linux, he's leaving his peers in the dust being wrong about Apple. His wikipedia article, as of this writing, credits him with

predicting the demise of the Macintosh more times since 1995 than any other industry observer.

Technology observer John Gruber has described Enderle's predictions on Apple as "nearly always completely wrong (at least regarding Apple), and that "the only way it would be worthwhile for tech reporters to continue to press Enderle for quotes would be if they were willing to describe him as “almost always utterly wrong”, thus letting readers know that the opposite of what he claims is probably the case"

In conclusion, if you are reading an article or listening to a segment, when the name 'Enderle' comes on, treat what follows with the same reverence and seriousness you would give to investment advice from a cracked-out Amy Winehouse.