A funny thing is happening in the wake of the <a href="http://www.computerworld.com/article/2490179/security0/security0-the-snowden-leaks-a-timeline.html">Edward Snowden NSA revelations</a>, the infamous <a href="http://www.computerworld.com/article/2601905/apple-icloud-take-reputation-hits-after-photo-scandal.html">iCloud hack of celebrity nude photos</a>, and the hit parade of customer data breaches at <a href="http://www.computerworld.com/article/2490637/security0/target-finally-gets-its-first-ciso.html">Target</a>, <a href="http://www.computerworld.com/article/2844491/home-depot-attackers-broke-in-using-a-vendors-stolen-credentials.html">Home Depot</a> and the <a href="http://www.computerworld.com/article/2845621/government/us-postal-service-suffers-breach-of-employee-customer-data.html">U.S. Postal Service</a>. If it's not the government looking at your data, it's bored, lonely teenagers from the Internet or credit card fraudsters.
It's easy to see why everybody wants to be a platform these days. Just look at Apple: By owning both the hardware and the operating system, it gets total control over what developers build on its platform -- and a sizable cut of the revenues besides. In return, developers get an unmatched distribution channel directly to customers' devices. As Apple extends to new devices, those developers get to come along.
Salesforce has a solid lock on the SMB space, and more forward-looking large organizations have moved to its cloud CRM, marketing and sales solutions, <a href="http://www.citeworld.com/article/2115522/social-collaboration/virgin-america-salesforce-chatter-intranet.html">apparently to great success</a>. But for every Virgin America or Burberry, there are many, many more older companies out there with siloed-off, older systems; they couldn't get their data into the Salesforce cloud even if they wanted to.
Cloud sync-and-share company Box thinks it's pretty much nailed down its sales pitch to the enterprise: Keep all your data accessible to everybody on every device, with all the regulatory compliance needs of the modern enterprise.
Identity is hard.
Today, GitHub Enterprise gets what the company is unofficially calling a "Version 2.0" release, with major new features that make the on-premises code repository more enterprise-friendly. That includes support for deploying GitHub Enterprise in the Amazon Web Services public cloud, high availability and disaster recovery options, better support for LDAP and SAML, and updates to code review and project management.
Xamarin has launched a new program designed to get its popular mobile app building platform into the hands of America's students, because children are our future or something like that.
There are two ways to think about #GamerGate.
"I used to be with it, but then they changed what it was. Now what I'm with isn't it and what's it seems weird and scary to me. It'll happen to you!" warned Abraham Simpson - of the Springfield Simpsons - way back in 1996.
By now, you've likely <a href="http://www.computerworld.com/article/2837807/one-missed-email-and-google-inbox-will-be-in-trouble.html">heard about Inbox</a>, Google's bold new plan to reinvent email with a smarter, more context-sensitive interface that treats messaging like just another to-do list.
The problem with Twitter has always been monetization: Ads don't pull in the revenue needed to maintain the social network, and it doesn't have Facebook's pull to entice developers to build on top of the platform. But no more -- or at least so Twitter hopes.
At its most recent Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) event in June, Apple took the lid off something it had been silently cooking for years: Swift, a new programming language in the C family designed to combine the robustness of the Objective-C that iOS and OS X developers were used to with the speed of scripting languages like Python.
It's good to be Salesforce -- and increasingly bad to be anybody else.
Like probably millions of others today, I upgraded my iPhone 5 to the brand-spanking-new iOS 8. I'm still wrapping my head around the major new features, like the problem-struckHealthKit, and I haven't been able to really fiddle with the major camera upgrades yet. But in just a couple of hours of normal usage, it's really the little tweaks to the experience that are standing out to me.