InformationWeek: The Business Value of Technology

Top 10 Tech Fails Of 2012

By Jeff Bertolucci 12/29/2012 Sometimes technology disappoints. Here are some of the products, services and companies that let us down in 2012.

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Hewlett-Packard

A noteworthy tech fail often centers on a particular product or service, but Hewlett-Packard earned special recognition in 2012 for doing just about everything wrong. It admitted publicly in November that it had wildly overpaid for Autonomy, an enterprise software company that HP bought for $11.1 billion just over a year ago. Accusing Autonomy of cooking the books prior to the acquisition, HP took a charge of $8.8 billion after writing down the value of its pricey new software unit.

As if that wasn't enough, HP suffered a blow to its ego when Lenovo became the world's No. 1 PC maker in the 3rd quarter, according to Gartner. And HP has yet to gain a foothold in the mobile device market, despite several failed attempts to build smartphones and tablets that people actually want.

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