10 Biggest Tech Letdowns of 2011

Hewlett-Packard was a land of confusion in 2011. It abandoned its WebOS mobile operating system and sold off its HP Touchpad tablets in a fire sale, letting down countless developers who invested in the platform and businesses and consumers hoping to take a chance on the OS. Making matters worse, HP announced in August that it would spin off or sell its PC business, only to say in October after Meg Whitman became CEO that the company, in fact, would be keeping its PC business intact.

RIM experience a nightmarish, worst-ever network outage in October. The outage lasted three days and shut down text messaging, Internet access and, in some cases, voice calling services for millions of BlackBerry users around the world. It was another black mark in an awful year for RIM where its sales, customer loyalty and stock price plummeted.

Is it me or has Google become a very reactive company? Like Microsoft, Google now has the money and resources to wait and see what becomes popular, and then create its own version. Case in point: Google+ and Google Music. Both are Google rehashes of a social media site and cloud music service that already exist, Facebook and Amazon Cloud Player, respectively. Both Google+ and Google Music debuted this year and are still babies, so they deserve time to marinate. But so far it’s been mostly shrugs from the public for both services.

Yahoo has been in trouble for years, but 2011 was especially bad. CEO Carol Bartz was fired in September and has yet to be replaced. (CFO Tim Morse is interim CEO.) It’s unclear what exactly Yahoo is doing anymore. It has folded most of its search operations into Microsoft Bing. It is slipping dangerously in the online advertising war with Google and Facebook, and for all the traffic that Yahoo still generates, it has not been able to monetize it. The company needs to do a serious makeover or put itself on sale. Something’s got to give in 2012.