Rob Enderle Humiliates Himself Again. And Again.

JUST when you thought Rob Enderle couldn't possibly make himself look like more of an ass, he goes and writes something like this: a venomous ad hominem attack on Steve Jobs, where he questions, without any irony whatsoever, the Apple CEO's sanity.

The problem here is that the impetus for Enderle's attempt at psychological diagnosis is a joke. Literally. It's based on recent posts from the blog of Fake Steve Jobs in which FSJ (aka the Forbes reporter Dan Lyons) claimed to have been approached by Apple lawyers and offered $500,000 to shut down his site. You could say, as Enderle later did, that the joke was all too credible -- until you realize, of course, that the FSJ blog has been dripping with satire since day one. Oh, and then there was that glaring giveaway of Tony Clifton being FSJ's legal representation. Not to mention all the post comments saying something to the effect of, "Ha ha. Good one. You almost had me there." So on second thought, maybe the joke wasn't that credible after all.

Enderle added insult to injury in his follow-up (linked above). Not an apology. Not a retraction. Not a mea culpa. A follow-up. In it, Enderle tried to cast himself as a victim of misleading information, and then to maintain that he was, in a unique way, and given the right weather on the right day, kinda sorta right. It also got him thinking about other stuff, too, since an abrupt change of subject after all the blame-shifting might help you forget he's a complete ass.

The real kicker? Quoth Enderle:

Right now the controls over power abuse, particularly in the media, appear to be unusually low. As we wind our way into an election year, we might want to think about that. Also, when it comes to technology products, which is what this is supposed to be about after all, it may be increasingly wise to look under the covers and check references. Just because something looks good doesn’t mean it is, and certainly doesn’t mean it will be good for your unique circumstances.

Uh, say again? Enderle, the useless, irrelevant, downright deceptive quotemill and oft-cited "expert" or "analyst" who apparently keeps a personal tally of his own media hit-and-runs is giving us a warning against abuses of power? Few people take advantage of the media more than this clown.

As commenters have pointed out in response to these particular posts, Enderle himself is the best satire of all, simply because he's so blissfully, even delusionally unaware of how inept he is –– a condition that seems to affect more than a few self-styled analysts. For crying out loud, he not only doesn't recognize irony when he reads it, he can't even use the word correctly, even though he employs it twice in his 500-word follow-up. His predictions and opinions are consistently, embarrassingly, abysmally wrong, and Enderle, as well as any reporter who quotes him in earnest, ought to pack his bags and take up a new career. I'm thinking something like ranching, since he's proven himself so adept at shoveling BS.

[EDIT: Case in point, this newly posted CNBC article naming Jobs their Face Of Business for 2007. Sure, it's full of praise for Jobs, but the writer is still struggling with basic spelling mistakes ("And since it's [sic] launch in late June, the iPhone..." and "will jobs [sic] get the job done in '08?") and calls in Enderle to make some characteristically idiotic statement about the iPhone:

“Because it's all brand new, chances are it's not going to be particularly reliable so all of that wrapped up into a package makes what's a very pretty phone -- makes you probably want to wait for generation two,” said Rob Enderle of Enderle Group.

Rob, you've had six months to make an assessment, and that time has shown that reliability is not one of the iPhone's few problems. And furthermore, the same could be said of any technology, not just Apple's. How's that ranching career choice coming along?]