Aaron Adams’s Blowhard Blog

[Addendum added 8/28/2004 19:45]

I don’t think Rob Enderle has ever been right about anything in his life. If you don’t know who he is, Rob is the sole member of the Enderle Group, and he seems to make his living by providing thoughtless comments to any reporter ignorant enough to listen to him.

So what dumb thing did he say today?

As quoted in this article from Reuters:

“”The expectation on the iPod is that HP’s version will probably outsell Apple’s version relatively quickly,” Enderle said, due to HP’s broad distribution at electronics retailers.

Who’s expectation is this? And how fast is relatively quickly? Six weeks? A year? Three years? Why should we put any stock into your punditry if you won’t give us any objective criteria against which to measure its accuracy? Even without that measurement ability, he’s done everything possible to disown the entire comment.

Regardless of how Rob’s comment is structured, there’s one simple fact that makes it wrong: Apple, by their own admission, cannot produce enough iPods to keep up with demand to this point. How will enough iPods be produced to keep up with with Apple and HP’s demand, and also allow HP to outsell Apple “relatively quickly”?

For the foreseeable future, which I’ll define as the end of 2004, demand for iPods from both HP and Apple will push production to its limits and still fall short of demand. It is entirely possible that HP could sell more iPods than Apple, but I believe it will be at least one year before that happens, and that’s not at all bad for Apple seeing as they get a cut of every iPod HP sells.

[Addendum] After reading about HP’s iPod yesterday, I realized that Enderle’s comment is that much more ridiculous considering there is no “HP version” of the iPod - devices being sold by Apple and HP are identical. HP is serving as a distributor of Apple hardware, not as a customizer. So there is no “HP version” to outsell the “Apple version” to begin with. HP may ship more iPods in the long run, but having a greater sales volume of the same product is much different than selling more of an altered or customized product altogether. Rob apparently doesn’t understand what HP is doing to begin with.