After six months of contentious debate over U.S. National Security Agency surveillance programs, prompted by leaks from former government contractor Edward Snowden, the third week in December may have marked a major turning point.
For decades, scientists have fantasized about creating robots with brain-like intelligence. This year, researchers tempted by that dream made great progress on achieving what has been called the holy grail of computing.
With 2013 coming to an end, we took our annual look back at quotes from news stories over the last 12 months. Here are a handful that stuck with us through the year:
Thanks to computers and the Internet, everyone is playing games these days.
It was a typically busy year for SAP, with the company making headlines for strong sales of its HANA in-memory database, high-profile acquisitions and aggressive moves into cloud computing.
Over the past year, patent battles have been fought by tech companies in courtrooms all over the world. The litigation is far from over though, however, and will continue throughout 2013. This is what's at stake on the patent battlefield in the near future.
Among the raft of recent and upcoming Microsoft upgrades, Windows 8 towers in importance but its chances for success remain cloudy among enterprise customers.
The end of each year sparks an occasion for rumination on the past, as well as a longing gaze into the future. We shined up our crystal ball, rubbed our chin for a while, and sought opinions from industry analysts on what the future holds for the enterprise software market.
Some of the most memorable IT-related quotes were uttered in courtrooms this year, which involved a steady stream of legal challenges about intellectual property. In no particular order, these are some of the comments that stuck with us as 2012 winds to a close.
It's been a busy and transformative year for enterprise software. We dug through our story archives, talked to industry experts and put on our thinking caps to come up with this list of key events and emerging trends from 2012, all of which are set to have a lasting impact on the industry.
Sure, plenty of enterprise software projects go just fine and end up giving customers all the things vendors promise: lower operating costs, streamlined operations and happier users.
Dell's effort to move away from PCs into enterprise products has been slow as the company battles a challenging economy and tries to weave together acquisitions in a coherent manner.
Smartphone vendors will rely on upgrades such as full-HD screens and more powerful yet more frugal processors to entice customers to buy new phones in 2013.
As recently as a year ago, many enterprises couldn't have imagined that the iPhone would now be second place in terms of security features that enterprises require, behind only the BlackBerry and ahead of Android and Microsoft's Windows Phone 7.