The Back Page - Bryan Chaffin & Rob Enderle Duke It Out In Heads Up Debate
by - May 7th, 2004

There are times when I really, really enjoy what I do for a living. OK, let's be honest, I almost always enjoy what I do, but there are times when that enjoyment transcends the every day pleasures. Today, or rather this last week, is one such example. We've rolled our new design, we just rolled out our fabulous new comment system, and I got to debate one of the worst analysts in the market.

I am talking about Rob Enderle, of course, head of his self-titled "The Enderle Group." Long time TMO readers will recognize the name from the Apple Death Knell Counter, where he is the current reigning record holder with no fewer than 4 (recent) pronouncements of impending doom for Apple. He's soon to get his 5th entry, too, but I can't talk about that yet.

A new Mac Web site called MacNewsWorld.com, part of the E-Commerce Times empire, asked me if I would like to debate Mr. Enderle. You betcha.

I honestly didn't think Mr. Enderle would be so inclined, however, as I have said some rather frank (i.e. mean) things about him in my frequent deconstructions of his writings in the past. Mr. Enderle, however, is apparently bigger than that, because he agreed so long as we avoided personal attacks.

Fair enough.

The format was simple: MacNewsWorld asked us three questions, to which we responded. We were then given each other's responses for a rebuttal.

MacNewsWorld published the first round today in a piece titled, "Mac Death Match, Round One: Chaffin vs. Enderle." This installment deals with the first question, the ever popular "PowerPC or Intel" question so often debated in the tech world. From the article:

Rob Enderle: Apple's last financial report indicates its PC revenue is growing at five percent in a market that is growing between 16 percent and 20 percent, depending on whose numbers you trust and the region analyzed. The company steadily has been dropping share -- granted more slowly recently -- for the last decade. Much of what makes up its computers comes from others. The PowerPC comes from IBM; the OS kernel comes from FreeBSD, and other vendors manufacture much of what it sells. Very little Apple intellectual property (IP), as a percentage, makes up the Mac today.

[...]

Bryan Chaffin: For better or worse, Apple is married to the PowerPC platform. There are various and sundry reasons for this, but the primary reasons are the issues of legacy and entrenched development, the need to control the whole widget, and the real issue of processing power.

[...]

It's like shooting fish in a barrel...with a shot gun. The rebuttals come later, however, and I am not going to give anything away, so go stop by MacNewsWorld and read all of round one.

In the meanwhile, I salute Mr. Enderle for having the guts to do this, especially when I have so often ripped apart his arguments in the past.

began using Apple computers in 1983 in a high school BASIC programming class. He started using Macs in 1990 when the Kinko's guy taught him how to use Aldus PageMaker, finally buying a Power Computing Power 100 in 1995. Today, Bryan is the Editor of The Mac Observer, and has contributed to the print versions of MacAddict and MacFormat (UK).

You can send your comments directly to him, or you can also post your comments below.

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