If it’s the end of the year, it must be time for The Stupid to bring out their Holiday Cheer and CIO.com is no exception.
An article by Tom Kaneshige is titled “Apple in 2012: 5 Reasons It Will Be a Tough Year”. Oh no…what could go wrong in the next 12 months!?
Well…little actually but this article tries to make it seem like the company is one decision away from complete disaster. We’ll ignore the sleaze of CIO.com using three separate pages to show you five bullet points and head straight to the first of the five reasons:
CIOs should expect a warmer Apple with new CEO Tim Cook at the helm.
Wait…what? I thought this was “5 Reasons It Will Be a Tough Year” in 2012? I literally had to go back to the headline to make sure I hadn’t read it wrong. Boy, would I have egg on my face if that were true.
Luckily, the very next sentence reaffirmed my faith in the lack of writing skill of Kaneshige:
In the past, says veteran tech analyst Rob Enderle..
STOP. RIGHT. THERE….
It is a well known internet meme that any article quoting Rob Enderle has a number of things going for it:
- it will be poorly written
- the “reporter” writing the story is lazy
- No mention will be made of Enderle’s conflicts of interest in the subject matter
- Enderle will say something remarkably stupid and out of touch with reality
In a little over one thousand words, Kaneshige quotes Enderle directly seven separate times, using up a third of his word count. He has two quotes from others but both of those were pulled from different publications. So Kaneshige apparently only spoke to Enderle – or only Enderle gave Kaneshige the quotes he wanted for his story.
It gets even better when you start looking at the actual Enderle quotes. He claims that Apple will do better in the Enterprise because “Cook is more enterprise friendly” and yet, he thinks that Cook was just a misplaced puppet of Jobs saying, “they have the wrong guy at the top job…”
Enderle is also quoted as saying there will be an exodus of talent at the top – in 2013. How that makes 2012 “a tough year”, I’m not sure.
The last two Enderle quotes Kaneshige has included seem like they belong in a completely different article – they are about how much trouble RIM and Android are in…
But Kaneshige pretends to wrap a bow around his article with the ending of:
Which would be very good news for Apple.
Seemingly forgetting the premise of his own headline.
So, if we go back and look at the four things every Enderle quoting article includes, it looks like this one nailed it on all four counts.
Congratulations, Kaneshige!