Compared to, say, a journalist in a war zone, tech writers have it pretty good. The worst injury we can suffer is a stiff back from an especially long product keynote. The biggest job hazard is having our bad predictions thrown back at us, either by readers, or, in my case, by myself.

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“Illusory superiority” is what psychologists call the tendency of most people to overestimate their positive traits and underestimate their negative ones.

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At the SAP Influencer Summit on Tuesday, the company touted its mobile milestones and achievements for 2011, while promising major upgrades and improvements to its mobile software. (more…)

SuccessFactors will no doubt be the star of tomorrow’s SAP Influencer Summit. The future is always more fun to talk about. But if you want to hear about victories in the last 12 months, may I suggest that enterprise mobility is your topic?

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So Google Android framework engineer Dianne Hackborn responded Thursday evening to the accusations leveled by ex-Android intern Andrew Munn.
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The Blue Screen of Death still casts a negative halo around Windows despite basically disappearing from PCs a decade ago, after Windows XP arrived. Similarly, I wonder if Android will be unfairly dogged by a reputation for a sluggish user interface for years even if version 4.0 ‘Ice Cream Sandwich’ effectively solves this nagging rendering problem.

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Mobile Years are like Dog Years: highly accelerated. Case in point: when Ford Motor Company started thinking about Bring Your Own Device back in May 2007, it figured that demand for laptops would outstrip that for smartphones or tablets. And the mobile devices that workers picked would run Windows Mobile, Nokia’s Symbian operating system and Palm, predicted Ford experts.

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I’ve never worked in IT, but I imagine that the relationship between system administrators and their programming counterparts is often tense, with each camp jockeying for resources and alpha-dog status.

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