If you are among the regular readers of TG Daily, then you know that Rob Enderle is a frequent contributor to our coverage of the technology industry.  

You may not always agree with his opinion as we learn from week to week when we are following our readers' comments to Rob's articles. Even we at TG Daily sometimes question points he makes and we occasionally get into heated discussions. But we are very well aware of his background and experience and realize that he is one most knowledgeable general analysts in Silicon Valley today and we learned over the years that there's always a good reason why he has certain opinion.    

Often, he does not support the most popular opinion at a time, but his opinion is derived from spending a lot of time with key initiatives in Silicon Valley, which allows him to provide a very different view on current events – different from what the popular opinion often tries to make us believe. And yes, Rob makes mistakes, as we all do. In these cases, he feels the impact quite painfully, as he sometimes is criticized harshly for the opinion he voices. But some may actually be surprised to learn about Rob's common sense nature and eagerness to learn and analyze the potential impact of a technology trend down to the last detail.  

Public exposure is nice and can boost your ego, but it isn't always a great thing. Many people that are followed by the media occasionally get into trouble for not thinking enough about what they say in front of reporters with notebooks, voice recorders or even video cameras. Taken out of context or not, missteps can get you everything from raised eyebrows to a pink slip from your employer – or, in this case, death threats. Rob has made his experiences with that during the SCO-Linux battle and if you have been following the case, then you may recall that, early on, there was some irritation about an article Rob wrote and a keynote he gave at a SCO event back in 2004.  

I personally have not read this article, have not been at this event and never have seen the transcript. But I somewhat followed the outrage and rather inappropriate reactions from some members of the Linux community. But, with SCO having its battle lost, we felt that it was a good time to reflect on this part of the SCO story as well and we asked Rob to tell us his side of the story.    

He promptly answered our request and sent us the following in-depth story. As always, we invite you to join the discussion at the end of the article. We know about of the enthusiasm and passion that surrounds this topic, so we do ask you to read the article in its entirety before submitting a comment. As it is the case with all other comments, we will not release any comments that include insults, threats or foul language. Treat others as you expect others to treat you.

 

Looking back at my history with SCO

Rob Enderle, Principal Analyst, Enderle Group   
 

With SCO going into Chapter 11 bankruptcy and likely to drop into Chapter 7, and given some of the mail and posts I’ve been getting, I agree that it is time to look back a bit at my experience with SCO. Like Dan Lyons, I was deceived. But unlike him, it wasn’t just SCO; there were the Linux loyalists who pushed me onto SCO’s side as well. Now this is a long piece, probably one of the longest I’ve ever written, and even so it leaves stuff out, so bear with me and I’ll try to keep it interesting.   

We all have personality quirks, things that just tick us off and impact the way we see the world and make certain decisions as a result. These things create the foundation for our personalities and it used to be common practice to use this information to profile competing executives and more accurately guess their future moves. In my case, abusive behavior truly angers me deeply. I have to admit it also affects how I look at Apple, because I’ve read a number of the Steve Jobs biographies and concluded he has been excessively abusive to the people he manages.       

In my past life, there have been three instances at which I should have resigned because of ethics concerns. I’m ashamed to say that I actually resigned only once because of that reason. The other two will haunt me the rest of my life. It is interesting to note that it was partially because of SCO that I resigned from Forrester Research. I am often accused of being a shill for Microsoft; something many - who know me - actually think is very funny. I have always said what I believed and I have historically been adamant to say that people who tell people just what they want to hear, or can be bribed to say what they don’t believe, are company killers. I have no desire to be like them.     

It’s been ironic that, while Microsoft is one of my clients, the company also is the only client that asked me to not have anything to do with the SCO topic. I’m an inquiry analyst and my clients like me being focused on things I am a recognized specialist in. Linux is not in that class. So, while some still claim that Microsoft pushed me to support SCO, Microsoft had nothing to do with me getting pulled into this controversy. They actually asked me to pull out.   

Let’s start with my best recollection of how I started with SCO. Realize this is my best recollection and that this has been a number of years and all of us involved may remember things differently.    

Getting pulled into SCO

Back in 2003, I was not only a senior fellow at one of the large market research firms; I also was in charge of media access, primarily because I was more active with the media than any other of the analysts) I had to make sure we could stand behind what our Open Source analyst was saying: She took the initial position that SCO’s copied code claim was a lie.     

In our business, you can call a vendor a liar but, unless you don't want to spend a lot of quality time in court, you do need to make sure you can defend your claim by showing a reasonable amount of research. At the very least, you have to talk to the vendor you are accusing.   

Our analyst indicated that SCO wouldn’t speak to her, so I contacted them myself to see if this claim was true. They said 'nope' and told me that they would show us the code. She refused to meet with them and then did everything in her power to keep me from meeting with them. I actually never had this happen before in the years I had been an analyst: I carried the title of vice president and she was near entry level. Preventing the meeting should not have been possible, not even remotely. She almost was successful.   

There was a second event going on at the same time that should have been unrelated, but played into the result.  

 

Contributing factors   

During this time, I was asked to write my first column. I re-purposed a piece I had written before, also on request by another publication, which had taken me a great deal of time to create. Initially, I had written this article as the con-side of a debate on whether Linux was ready for the enterprise. They had a CIO doing the pro-side and our Linux analyst should have written the piece, but it was my opinion that she did not have the writing skills to do it successfully.      

It is part of the job of an experienced analyst to be able to argue both sides of a critical question. The more experienced you are, the more likely you are to get the harder of the two sides and, frankly, I like the challenge. In this case, however, we weren’t actually given the choice.     

I’m reasonably competitive, and given Linux was already going into the enterprise, I was at a massive disadvantage with the task to represent the con-side. I spent the better part of a week writing something I thought would win the discussion and apparently did such a good job that the competing CIO, who had taken the pro-side, quit and walked away from the project (granted, I could have rewritten my side to lose, but losing on purpose isn’t in my DNA). So, the initial piece was never published.      

These pro-con articles are done so that people can look at strong arguments from both sides and form their own opinions. Plus, strongly opinionated articles tend to pull massive traffic which doesn’t hurt the publications either. Though being on the con-side of things can do some ugly things to your inbound email, as I was about to discover.

When CMP asked me to do a monthly column, I took this piece and rewrote the beginning to make it an example of why you need to make measured decisions when picking any technology. I could have as easily pounded on Windows as the example I ended up using, but I really wanted to get some use out of this Linux thing I had created before. The editor I worked with thought the headline of my article was wimpy and changed it to “Why Linux Isn’t Ready for the Enterprise”.  

 

Read on the next page: A firestorm develops, seeing the ugly side of people and the purpose of the SCO keynote