how is salesforce.com going to give back to the big data community?
it's a bit like apple. there's no way to pass their "improvements" to BSD on to the BSD community even if they felt magnimonious some day...
generally big tech (aside from IBM, Xerox Parc, and the OLD GUARD that actually did paid research) today are webstack leechers...
maybe the VCs even try to clone techstacks from successful startups but minus that genius builder person who arbitrarily chose reasonably suitable tools because she was familiar and comfortable with them... so instead we get ten million companies looking for "xyz engineers" which is just a big stupid turd sitting in front of us: no, you need a person who may possibly have a comp sci education but has hands on experience building stuff and sees how things work.
Where's our moon landing, where's the next major paradigm shift in user interfaces coming from?
where is the salesforce.com ai institute where we can study the big data techniques they pioneered?
the last refuge of real computing == academia? or perhaps the fringe? garages? hey it's never been cheaper to make an asic, they say...