Speaking of Clowns

Wednesday, 3 January 2007

It’s a Jackass of the Week dream team: Rob Enderle and Paul Thurrott.

Rob Enderle continues to bang the drum of the Forrester Research report from a few weeks ago that supposedly showed a drop in iTunes Store music sales in 2006, an interpretation that Forrester itself has since said is not the case.

Enderle dismisses a report from ComScore that shows that iTunes sales are actually up 84 percent from the year-ago quarter by insinuating that the ComScore report was paid for by Apple and therefore not trustworthy. I have no idea whether ComScore’s report is actually accurate (we should find out next week if Jobs talks about iTunes sales figures in his keynote), but ComScore’s chairman Gian Fulgoni personally refuted Enderle’s suggestion that their iTunes report was commissioned or paid for by Apple. It’s apparently something Enderle just made up, disparaging ComScore’s integrity.

Thurrott gets co-jackass honors for calling Enderle’s column “excellent”. This for a column where Enderle writes:

For those of us who really follow Apple, it is common knowledge that the company you see from the CEO on down is a construct. The public “Steve Jobs” is a character created by Apple’s agency played by a guy named “Steve Jobs” — that’s why Apple doesn’t like the Jobs biographies — they break the image. Had they gone the Ronald McDonald route, they could probably keep the name and change the guy.

Sometimes I wonder if Enderle isn’t so much a jackass as he is a nutcase.