Rob Enderle Product Quotations

A few years back you couldn't point to a single Dell laptop and suggest that it was something anybody wanted to carry. We've seen these products become much more attractive over time.

The GPS navigation market is poised for rapid growth in the US in 2006. The most successful GPS products will be those with affordable prices, strong performance, and a simple user interface.

Microsoft has entered as a full-fledged competitor. The (Windows Live) search product looks to be more advanced by a generation, and we're going to have a leapfrog competition as the two firms try to out do each other.

Given the fact that the desktop market space is predominately Windows, the results show an unusually high degree of dissatisfaction with the existing product and . . . a willingness to move to something else -- almost anything else -- to relieve their pain.

Hopefully they'll learn this lesson -- that they absolutely cannot come out years in advance of a product and talk about a wish list of things that may or may not make it in.

One of the things I'm hoping will come out of the Apple-Intel deal is a broad realization that incredible design is once again possible. Over the years the hardware OEMs have consistently used Intel and Microsoft as reasons they can't build really cool products. Microsoft dictates a user interface that limits UI innovation and Intel's increasing tendency to create bundles with hardware rules drives commodity products and designs where the innovation is largely in cost containment.

It's the product launch you look at to see if they got the merger right. This shows they're back up and running and open for business, which is important because in a merger, people forget the company has products and focus on the merger only. So far they haven't broken anything.