Let me begin by saying, like many others before me, that it’s one of life’s great mysteries how Rob Enderle still has a job as a technology consultant, and even more puzzling how reporters for major news organizations continue to use him as a source. Before we get to the latest Enderle boondoggle, here’s what the bio on his blog says about him:

Rob is President and Principal Analyst of the Enderle Group, a forward looking emerging technology advisory firm, and one of the most recognized commentators on tech. Before founding the Enderle Group, Rob held leading positions with Forrester Research and the Giga Information Group.

That’s one of the funniest (in a bad way) bio’s I’ve read in a long time. “Forward looking?” Enderle has been more consistently wrong, by a wide margin, than any other tech commentator on the planet. What he’s “recognized” for is his utter lack of knowledge, inability to fact-check, and ridiculous statements that have earned him a lifetime “Jackass” award. John Gruber over at Daring Fireball (arbiter of the “Jackass of the Week” award) has been following Enderle’s misadventures for many years. You can read through his many articles taking Enderle to task. On to the latest and greatest from The Rob.

On December 26, Enderle posted an article on his blog titled “Is Apple Rotting from the Inside Out?. This “article” was in response to a series of articles on Dan Lyons’ Fake Steve Jobs blog about Apple threatening to take down the popular blog. It should be pointed out that everyone in the tech world has known for a very long time that the Fake Steve Jobs blog is a parody site put out by Dan Lyons. It should also be pointed out that anyone not in the tech world, or not otherwise familiar with the blog, should be tipped off by the word “Fake” prominently featured in the title. So, what does our “most recognized commentator” Rob Enderle do? He writes a long-winded diatribe after falling for the “Fake” stories hook, line, and sinker.

From Enderle’s article:

I started this week thinking about Apple killing off Think Secret and actually threatening the income and family – during the Christmas season, mind you – of the highly visible Forbes reporter who pens the very popular Fake Steve Jobs blog.

Hmmm. Seems like Rob Enderle has mistaken parody and satire for “actually thretening” the Fake Steve. I wonder if Rob actually read any of the posts on the Fake Steve website? I wonder if this passage, for example, raised any red flags about the “truthiness” of the posts?:

This is followed by a recommendation that I retain an attorney to represent me. And then, I swear to friggin God, there’s a list of my assets with an estimated value for each and I suppose the implied threat that I stand to lose them. Which kinda scares the living shit out of me, to be honest, since they’ve got a pretty thorough list, which means they’ve been doing some research on this and the offer didn’t just come out of thin air.

Or, how about this little nugget from Fake Steve regarding which posts on the parody site were supposedly “actionable”?:

Third was in May 2007 when I said there would be new hardware announced at the WWDC in June. Seemed like a pretty safe guess to me at the time. They’re claiming I had sources.

Surely Rob couldn’t have thought any of this was serious, right? Wrong:

With this success firmly in hand, Apple next went after Dan Lyons, who is one of the top journalists at Forbes. First it offered him money. When he disclosed this bribe, it threatened his income and his family. The evidence it had was so incredibly lame that if it weren’t for the fact that this kind of thing in my world is deadly serious, it would be funny. Thanks to SlashDot for bringing this to our attention.

Now, when reading the Slashdot story and accompanying comments, it’s very clear this was a joke posted to a parody/satire blog. Unfortunately, our intrepid “reporter” Rob Enderle missed the boat. Fast forward to December 28th where Enderle makes a lame attempt at an apology in his post titled “Falling for the Dan Lyons Apple Hoax: Implications and Portents. Rob has really outdone himself here.

In my previous post, I got upset about what appeared to be a personal attack on Dan Lyons by Apple. Today I found out that Dan was trying to draw more attention to the Think Secret shutdown which, I agree, we should have all been more concerned about than we were. But Apple never actually went after Dan. I clearly was drinking way too much eggnog to see the joke for what it was. It was kind of ironic that it was a Slashdot post that got me going in the first place.

What’s truly ironic is not that Rob fell for a series of posts on a parody site with the word “Fake” in the title, but that he still doesn’t get it. For one thing, the Fake Steve Jobs wasn’t “trying to draw attention to the Think Secret shutdown”, he was making fun of the flap surrounding Think Secret (most of it shoveled forth from Rob himself.) Enderle spend the rest of the post re-hashing his horribly inaccurate thoughts on the Think Secret shutdown.

Before the Internet, shutting down a publication covering a company as a result of talking about real facts would have been nearly impossible — but Apple did it in passing, which should have troubled more of us than it did.

For those of you not familiar with the Think Secret case, here it is in a nutshell: Think Secret was a rumor site run by a college student. Someone who had signed a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) with Apple broke the agreement by sending privileged information to Think Secret, which they then posted. Not only that, but Think Secret openly encouraged others to break their NDA’s and send the site all the Apple trade secrets they could find. Apple asked Think Secret to take down the post and divulge the source of the breach. Think Secret initially refused then ultimately accepted an agreement with Apple for an undisclosed amount of money to voluntarily shut down the site.

Rob Enderle mistakenly believes that Apple was bullying Think Secret, and that Think Secret did nothing wrong because the information they posted were “real facts.” The concept (and legality) of a non-disclosure agreement completely escapes Rob, even though they are standard operating procedure in the industry where he is a self-described “expert.” Enderle further showcases his ineptitude when he states that since Think Secret wasn’t the one under the NDA, they were not at fault. A quick check of the Uniform Trade Secrets act, however, shows that a person (or company) misappropriates a trade secret if they disclose information from a source they know (or later discover) was under a non-disclosure agreement.

So, I ask (rhetorically) again: why is Rob Enderle still quoted by the mainstream press as a so-called technology expert?