Notable this year is Apple, with its whopping $156 billion in 2012 sales, jumping into the top 10 for the first time in its 37-year history. And Google, with its big $50 billion year, bulled its way up almost 20 spots to hit No. 55. Perhaps most impressive, however, is Facebook, which with the youngest CEO in the Fortune 500 made the list for the very first time at 487.

Ranking companies by income is a fairly arbitrary measure, since it reveals little about how much companies actually earn, but it does show scope and scale. A grain of salt is definitely indicated, however, as Google’s profits, for instance, are many multiples of Dell’s despite that Dell is ranked No. 51 and Google is No. 55.

Here are the 41 technology companies that Fortune included on its list.

• 6: Apple
• 15: HP
• 20: IBM
• 35: Microsoft
• 49: Amazon
• 51: Dell
• 54: Intel
• 55: Google
• 60: Cisco Systems
• 80: Oracle
• 131: Xerox
• 133: EMC
• 176: Computer Sciences
• 163: Jabil Circuit
• 194: Qualcomm
• 196: eBay
• 218: Texas Instruments
• 222: Western Digital
• 240: SAIC
• 267: CDW
• 270: Liberty Interactive
• 302: Applied Materials
• 304: Motorola Solutions
• 318: Micron Technology
• 326: Corning
• 327: Broadcom
• 352: Congnizant Technology Solutions
• 379: Symantec
• 408: NetApp
• 420: Sanmina
• 429: Harris
• 436: Booz Allen Hamilton Holding
• 441: NCR
• 473: Priceline.com
• 464: AMD
• 477: Avaya
• 482: Facebook
• 487: SanDisk
• 489: Pitney Bowes
• 494: Yahoo
• 499: CA Technologies

A couple of caveats:

I have not included telecommunications companies such as AT&T and Verizon, although a good argument can be made that they are now, primarily, technology companies, simply because Fortune did not classify them in any recognizable technology category. And I have included retailers like CDW and companies like Pitney Bowes, which Fortune classifies in categories like Computers, Office Equipment, and Information Technology Services.

One interesting note: While Facebook has the Fortune 500′s youngest CEO, Dole Food’s David Murdock, at 90 years old, is the Fortune 500′s oldest CEO.

photo credit: mikesolita via photopin cc

And mobile devices like smartphones, tablets — and glasses — are coming up next, the company told me.

Currently, Leap Motion requires a tiny peripheral attached to your computer to enable 3-D motion control, but this deal means that HP customers will be able to control their PCs with waves, motions, and gestures in the air without any need for attached peripherals or extra software. Everything will just be built right in.

And that, according to Leap Motion chief operating officer Andy Miller, is just the beginning.

“Any place where you can fit tiny pinhead cameras, you can fit Leap,” Miller told me yesterday. “And this deal, we feel, is just huge for Leap, for our technology, for validation, and for our ability to miniaturize our hardware into tiny devices.”

Source: Leap Motion

The Leap controller – external version

The deal has been a year in the making, Miller said, as HP has long nurtured a relationship with Leap Motion and has been evaluating the startup’s technology for almost that long. Leap Motion and HP are not yet announcing the scope of the deal or which exact PCs HP will be embedding the technology into, but it will be a “very significant” number, probably in the millions.

HP is the leading PC retailer on the planet, selling 35 million PCs in the first quarter of 2013. The terms of the deal with Leap Motion allow HP to both embed the entire solution right into its products and offer an external Leap Motion controller bundled with a PC.

And although PC sales just had a disastrous quarter and HP sales were down 23 percent, this announcement could be just the stimulus HP needs to boost sales — and boost excitement for its products.

PCs, however, are just the beginning. The sky is the limit for Leap Motion, Miller said, as the company is looking to commercialize its incredibly detailed motion capture and control technology in industries as diverse as robotic surgery and automotive manufacturing. And in every mobile device you carry.

“We’re looking to embed our tech into watches, and smartphones, and glasses, and everything,” Miller said yesterday.

Which means the Android phone, and perhaps the iPhone you carry, could have motion recognition technology soon, as could your tablet. And the glasses part sounds very much like a Google Glass application, which would be an extremely interesting possibility. Leap Motion’s tiny sensor is amazingly precise, tracking both hands and all 10 fingers at 290 frames per second and detecting movements as small as 1/100 of a millimeter. All of which could make for some very interesting mobile applications.

That, however, is for the future.

Today, the news is HP and bundling into PCs. This is Leap Motion’s second major OEM bundling deal — the company announced a bundling agreement with Taiwan-based Asus in January. That deal, however, was just bundling; there was no embedding of the actual technology into laptops or desktops.

Miller mentioned that Leap Motion’s app store, Airspace, will also come pre-loaded on HP computers that come with the company’s technology.

Image credit: Minority Report

In March Apple licensed patents from the original Palm smartphone and PalmOS, which the Japanese company Access Co currently holds. The patents include technology also developed by Bell Communications Research and Geoworks.

The sale was worth $10 million, according to an announcement by Access.

AppleInsider notes that Microsoft licensed some of the same patents in 2010 and that this is likely a defensive move to give Apple legal coverage in its ongoing patent battles with Samsung and others.

Palm ushered in the brief but exciting world of personal digital assistants that originally did little more than manage calendars and schedules, and eventually it became one of the early smartphones. HP acquired Palm in 2010 for over a billion dollars, and its software powers the HP TouchPad, which was discontinued 50 days after launching. Palm OS has since been open-sourced and is now HP WebOS.

Access Co. did not provide any detail about which patents were actually bought, other than that they are smartphone-related.

photo credit: Pinot & Dita via photopin cc

The company had net income of $1.2 billion for the first quarter of 2013, compared to $1.5 billion in the same quarter a year ago, as revenue fell to $28.4 billion. That translates to $0.82 per share, which is down 11 percent from 2012 but is well above HP’s previously provided guidance of $0.68 to $0.71 per share.

It’s better than HP’s outlook in November, when the company had just reported bad numbers and came clean on a bad acquisition. And it’s much better than the second quarter of 2012, when HP faced its biggest-ever quarterly loss.

CEO Meg Whitman was cautiously optimistic about the results:

“We beat our non-GAAP diluted EPS outlook for the quarter by $0.11 per share, driven by improved execution, improvement in our channel and go-to-market efforts and the impact of the restructuring program we announced in May 2012,” Whitman said in a statement. “While there’s still a lot of work to do to generate the kind of growth we want to see, our turnaround is starting to gain traction as a result of the actions we took in 2012 to lay the foundation for HP’s future.”

HP shares are up with the news, jumping to $18.50 in after-hours trading:

Source: Google Finance

HP share price

Another good bit of news: Cash flow from operations was up 115 percent from Q1 2012 to $2.6 billion. In addition, HP reduced its overall debt by more than $1 billion — for the fourth consecutive quarter. If the company continues to improve like this — and can start to increase revenue in some business groups — we might even have to say HP is back sometime soon.

We still see some major signs of trouble, however. Although HP may have stemmed the bleeding with ferocious attention to cost control and limiting expenditures, its income is down almost across all its business units:

• Personal Systems: Down 8 percent
• Printing: Down 5 percent
• Enterprise Group: Down 4 percent
• Enterprise Services: Down 7 percent
• Software: Down 2 percent
• HP Financial Services: Up 1 percent, even though financing volume was down 25 percent

And one thing we absolutely have to see from HP before any sort of comeback is even possible is a coherent mobile strategy.

Currently, smartphones are buried on HP’s website in a category labeled “HP Smartphones & Calculators.” This is not a joke … or at least not one of my making:

Source: HP

HP’s smartphone “section”

Listed is the superpopular and ultramodern Palm Pre 2 and the HP Veer. Yeah, the HP Veer.

Whitman has previously stated that HP will not be releasing a new smartphone until 2014, which seems slow and suicidal. One ray of light: It’s reportedly working on Android-based tablets and phones. But without an aggressive product and marketing strategy, it’s approaching the too-little, too-late moment.

Unless HP wants to give up on the consumer market entirely.

photo credit: włodi via photopin cc

Last year Apple was the 14th most trusted company in America, and Google was the 19th, according to the Ponemon Institute’s privacy report, released today. Facebook most recently made an appearance on the list in 2009, as did AOL, while Yahoo dropped off in 2010.

“There’s been a lot of media coverage about companies like Google, Facebook [and] Apple and privacy,” Ponenmon’s executive director, Susan Jayson told me this morning. “Consumers are concerned about their privacy, and this kind of media exposure, plus their personal experiences, all contribute to people getting concerned.”

That’s something the study, which reached over 7,000 Americans, made clear. Almost half, 49 percent, of respondents remembered receiving at least one data breach notification in the past year, telling them that some company had some kind of intrusion or leak that had exposed their personal data.

Identity Thief, the movie

People’s biggest concern is identity theft: 61 percent of respondents highlighted it as the most significant privacy-related threat. It’s become such a common fear that it’s the topic of an upcoming movie: Identity Thief.

“Protection against identity theft keeps coming up in our research,” Jayson said. “People are very concerned about becoming the target of a thief … which includes medical identity theft and credit card identity theft.”

And what should be the safest places sometimes are not. Jayson’s own mother-in-law had her credit cards and other personal information stolen when checking into a Toussaint, Arizona hospital, and identity thieves indulged in a multi-thousand-dollar shopping marathon at her expense while she was sick.

Perception is the biggest problem for today’s top technology companies, Jayon says. While giants like Google provide immense value, a huge amount of personal data is tied up in your Google identity, especially when linked to your Android-based mobile phone or tablet. Similarly, Apple’s iCloud is wonderful for backing up an old phone and restoring all your contacts, data, apps, and more on a new phone, but it comes at the cost of sharing a great deal of information that gets stored at a corporate data center. And while both Google and Apple have been very good about protecting people’s information, the worry seems to remain.

Facebook, of course, might be the company that knows the most about us, and it’s continually in the public eye for confusing privacy policies, real or imagined gaffes, and a perception that the company is always trying to make more data public.

“Companies are in a bind,” Jayson says. “They don’t want to tell criminals exactly what they’re doing, but they do want to let consumers know that they’re putting in safeguards. And people do love convenience — so they use crummy passwords but still expect companies to protect them.”

Interestingly, one of the biggest privacy challenges that people identified is their own government. ”People are getting concerned about government intrusion into their lives … government surveillance via drones, and agencies like the TSA and DHS,” Jayson told me.

Here are the top 20 companies in America for privacy, as rated by consumers:

photo credit: Jesus Belzunce via photopin cc

We’ve seen the clash of titans in mobile as Apple, Google, and Microsoft have released new phones, tablets, and mobile operating systems. We’ve seen a single network connect over a billion people worldwide. We’ve seen the once-great mobile company of the far European north forced to hawk its headquarters to raise cash. And we’ve seen social media move from cutting-edge to mainstream as the Obama campaign celebrated four more years.

In every year, we see winners and losers: companies, devices, or operating systems. Here’s our look at some of the biggest successes and failures of 2012.

The winners

	Android What more can you say about Android? With 75 percent market share in the third quarter of 2012, the free mobile operating system from Google looks poised to take over the world.
	Samsung  Not many companies sell 55 million smartphones in a quarter. Samsung did, and it will probably do it again.
	Galaxy S III Samsung is hot in large part due to its top smartphone, the Galaxy S III. With over 18 million units shipped in the third quarter, and 30 million shipped in five months, it’s easy to see why.
	iPhone 5 Sure, it was Time’s gadget of the year. But more importantly, iPhone 5 catapulted Apple back into the smartphone leadership position, at least in the U.S.
	iPad Mini We called it immediately: light, portable, awesome, and expensive. And it even looked better up close and person in our review. But we had no clue it would become one of Apple’s best-selling iPads. And now that it’s probably going Retina in April/May, it’s just getting better.
	YouTube YouTube continues to be the online leader, by far, in online video with 800 million visitors and billion-view channels created by individuals and brands. Despite getting the boot from iOS6, YouTube just continues to grow, with 25 times the video streams of its nearest competitor.
	Twitter 2012 is the year that Twitter went mainstream, reaching 500 million users mid-summer and just recently announcing 200 million monthly active users. And despite major new API restrictions that soured its relationship with developers, a very public spat with Instagram, and an evolving shift from social utility to media company, the company continues to grow and solidify its space in fast-breaking news.
	Instagram With a sale initially priced at almost $1.3 billion and an exploding user count, not even a tone-deaf terms-of-service change that spurred a class action lawsuit and a possible exodus of some users can keep Instagram off our winner list.
	Google Android is hot — 75 percent market-share hot. Search is still a massive strength for the iconic company that runs an ad 30 billion times each and every day. And so Google makes over $100 million a day – and hits our list of hot companies in 2012.
	ARM With the vast majority of the chips in smartphones running ARM processors, ARM has people wondering whether the mobile juggernaut will challenge Intel for CPU dominance. That’s still a stretch, but not nearly what it was just a few years ago.
	Reddit With 3.8 billion page views and 46 million unique visitors in October — double the previous year’s numbers — Reddit is continuing its torrid growth. And it doesn’t hurt when the POTUS himself chooses your site to do an informal meet-the-people session — which required 60 dedicated servers.

Next page: The losers

Pages: 1 2 3

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Ofir Nachmani is Chief Evangelist at Newvem

I believe that this is the year when the enterprise will find its way to the cloud.

The mega Internet sites and applications are the new era enterprises. These will become the role models for the traditional enterprise. IT needs remain the same with regards to scale, security, SLA, etc. However, the traditional enterprise CIO has already set the goal for next year: 100% efficiency.

The traditional CIO understands that in order to achieve that goal, IT will need to start and do cloud, make sure that IT resources are utilized right, and that his teams move fast.

1. Enterprise will move to the public cloud

The enterprise has already moved and started its proof-of-concept.

Those who have realized the option to reduce cost, increase agility, and enjoy the real benefits of the cloud will continue migrating the resources of their non-critical services. Internalizing the public cloud (specifically AWS cloud) will inspire the enterprise to learn how to maintain a robust, highly available and secured service on the public cloud. That will put the hybrid environment in the front, supporting bursting and load migrations.

The traditional enterprise follows the new era one, making sure to transition and acquire only online and mobile services. The SaaS market will continue to grow and be the premier source for the enterprise new online services.

2. Slow adoption of Openstack

OpenStack is one of the candidates to compete with AWS.

This open source platform is being led by heavy traditional industry, such as HP. These traditional vendors don’t have the Internet company culture of moving fast, supported by fast cycles of refinement. In 2012 Amazon released a huge number of new features to support the enterprise cloud, following great agile product management. By contrast HP, which leads the OpenStack community, is still dragging its feet while trying to copy the AWS base offering.

However, it is important to mention that a new trend is emerging in which enterprises are moving to deploy OpenStack instead of renewing VMware licenses.

3. Private cloud is still an option (at least for another year)

Although I am a public cloud “believer,” adoption takes time and the enterprise IT will not shut down its on-premises resources on the spot.

The hype supports the penetration of the cloud to every IT team, including the enterprise … but traditional enterprises want risk free migrations. The basic recommendation is to move on with a quick proof-of-concept to taste and test the actual benefits.

The next move comes when a need for additional resources arises, such as an upgrade, new application, or load growth. Once a real need for additional resources arises, IT managers will then decide whether to purchase new on-premises technologies or cloud resources. And the innovative IT leaders will choose the latter.

Another option is that the enterprise experiments on the public cloud, and only then purchases dedicated resources due to high lease costs. But once a real price war takes place, I believe that the preferred option will be the public cloud, although I’m not sure that this will happen in 2013.

For these reasons, the hybrid cloud model is still valid (unfortunately).

4. Cloud brokers and managed service providers will flourish

Thanks to the knowledge gap, the simple reality is that IT can’t meet the demand for cloud skills. In fact, according to an IDC study, the demand for cloud computing will grow at six times the rate of IT skills overall.

The re:Invent APN summit for partners and the IDC study strengthen the position of cloud managed services. It is obvious that Amazon loves its MSPs because these vendors are growing like crazy. I follow at least five different MSPs whose business as integrators of AWS has grown to 80-90 percent of their whole business, and these are growing amazingly fast.

Amazon also invests in these vendors as it knows that the way enterprise deals with time-to-market issues is by outsourcing, and it will continue to do the same in the future.

5. Transparency is a Key value

One of the most important things I have learned from HP Discover was that the enterprise wants and will be happy to pay to maintain control.

The cloud puts control and transparency at risk due to the fact that traditional enterprise leaders and users are used to having great control of IT resources, and the concept of not having the “irons” intimidates them. The cloud vendors and developers will have to make sure they report back to leaders on the adoption progress, making sure that these new IT resources generate the expected business benefits without harming services, compliance, SLAs, and so on.

Organizations that run to deploy without planning and control will put their cloud adoption and innovation at great risk. Choosing to run a business on a cloud is a strategic move, and picking the right way to manage your new cloud resource is part of this strategy.

And one wish for 2013 …

I wish that public cloud competition would become a reality very soon, that it would generate great price reductions, and that it would enable adoption. I hope that Amazon’s cloud will continue to strike and overwhelm everyone with its enterprise penetration, bringing that future even closer. And I hope that the traditional enterprise will be able to adopt “continuous integration” and “cycles of refinement” while removing constraints and presenting the great innovation that the cloud enables.

Ofir Nachmani is Chief Evangelist at Newvem, a web-based cloud usage analytics service that enables CIOs, CTOs, IT managers, Developers and Operators to capture and improve the effectiveness of their public cloud operations and ensure their cloud infrastructure is in sync with business performance. Follow him at @iamondemand.

Image credit: Google

Today the news broke that HP’s revenue is down and — worse news — the company paid far too much for its acquisition of Autonomy, and therefore must take an $8.8 billion accounting charge … on top of the $8 billion goodwill write-off the company already took in August.

Bad news at HP, it seems, comes in eights followed by billions.

I was intensely skeptical in October when CEO Meg Whitman said the HP turnaround would take five years, an eternity for skittish investors. Essentially, that was a message for investors to put their money elsewhere.

Which is precisely what they have done:

Source: Google Finance

HP stock price

Here’s just a sampling of some of the bad news:

• HP takes $8.8 billion charge over Autonomy
• HP turn-around will take 5 years
• HP won’t bring a smartphone to market in 2013
• HP’s brand “not right”
• HP design has “fallen behind”
• Lenovo tops HP in marketshare
• HP loses 4000 workers
• HP reports biggest quarterly loss in its history
• HP competes for the dubious prize of worst board in America

Add it all up, and it’s hard to imagine how HP is going to make this work. Even CEO Whitman says it will take five years. But the big question is whether HP has five years to take. The PC industry used to be fast-moving, but we’re well into a post-PC era that moves even faster, and HP won’t bring a smartphone into the market until 2014.

Won’t. Bring. A. Smartphone. To. Market. Until. 2014.

That bit of insanity tells you everything you need to know about HP. A quick back-of-the-envelope comparison with Apple: $117 billion out of its $156 billion in total sales are from the iPhone, iPad, and iPod segments. That’s a staggering 75% of its revenue, almost all of which is in market segments that HP is completely whiffing on.

Which is why, no doubt, the company has had five straight quarters of falling sales.

Meanwhile an HP division head — in charge of PCs, no less — has the gall to call Surface “slow and expensive.” He then added that HP is taking it slow on consumer tablets … hardly a surprise since HP so badly bungled the TouchPad opportunity.

Glass house, meet stones. HP is slow to react, slow to move. And HP stock, even at a 10-year low that has analysts “throwing in the towel,” is expensive.

The company still has a market cap of $22 billion and saw revenues of $30 billion this past quarter. Which means that it’s too early to throw in the towel. There is still runway to fix this.

But precious little.

photo credit: with an eye via photopin cc

PC optimization software Soluto helps over three million people in 182 countries get more out of their PCs. Along the way, the company learns a lot about what people do … and how their software works. Fortunately for us, the company shared that data a couple of days ago.

Here are some of the highlights:

European nations such as Hungary and Portugal are adopting Windows 8 quickly, with almost 9 percent adoption in Hungary and 5.29 percent in Portugal. China is also moving quickly, with more than seven percent of Windows users already on Microsoft’s new operating system. Americans, however, are adopting more of wait and see approach, with only 3.4 percent of Windows users updating.

In addition, with the touch-friendliness of Microsoft’s new operating system, Windows 8 is penetrating the tablet market much more effectively than Windows 7. For example, while less than two percent of Windows 7 machines are tablets, almost five percent of Windows 8 machines are, in fact, tablet computers — before Surface has really had a chance to make an impact yet.

Not actually a Windows 8 install disc

Interestingly, desktop use is also slightly higher, with almost 51 percent of Windows 8 installs being on a desktop PC, versus 48.5 percent of Windows 7 installs being on a laptop.

Some apps, Soluto found, crash less frequently on Windows 8.

That includes Google Drive, which is the most common app crash culprit on Windows 7, crashing for almost a third of all users (I guess companies can be great at everything). In Windows 8, however, Google Drive crashes for only one percent of users. TuneUp Utilities is another in the much-improved category, moving from crashing for 20 percent of its users on Windows 7 to five percent on Windows 8.

Some apps, of course, crash more on Windows 8. Facebook Video Calling, for instance, crashes at least once a month for a rather unlucky 13 percent of its users, compared to just one percent on Windows 7. And Apple’s iTunes software, often maligned for being bloated, crashes almost twice as much on Window 8.

Soluto also tracks PC brands that users have purchase. The top PC brands being used by Windows 8 early adopters are HP and Dell, with most than 30 percent of the market, followed in fourth and fifth spot by Asus and Acer:

1. 16.83% – HP
2. 14.65% – Dell
3. 10.71% – Gigabyte
4. 10.32% – Asus
5. 8.72% – Acer

One thing about crashing apps: Third-party developers don’t have a lock on them. Microsoft’s own Internet Explorer still crashes about the same amount on Windows 8 as it always has.

photo credit: gynti_46 via photopin cc, Robert Couse-Baker via photopin cc

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Everything you need to know about the iconic Silicon Valley company Hewlett Packard, the company that helped a young Steve Jobs get a toehold in micro-electronics, the company that virtually patented the egalitarian, decentralized mode of management codified in the HP Way, and the prototypical founded-in-a-garage to world-beating Titan, you can learn in this chart:

Source: Google Finance

HP (in blue) vs AAPL vs IBM vs Dow Jones average over the past 5 years

Today, a year after taking the top job at HP, chief executive Meg Whitman and her management team outlined a comprehensive strategy to turn the company around, reinvigorate HP’s culture of engineering, and return the enterprise to growth.

To do so, she’s focusing the company on major trends: cloud computing, data security, and “information optimization.” But she doesn’t expect to see results — growth in step with the U.S. economy — until 2016.

Ouch. That is a loooong ways away.

Big ships take a long time to turn around, true, but investors are rarely patient enough to wait around four years (I really want to use all caps on those two words) for the boat to stop leaking. It’s been a few months since Whitman was “cautiously optimistic” that HP was stabilizing, but the company announced today that major cuts and consolidations are still coming.

Patrick Moorhead, an analyst covering the company, is at least impressed with the honesty.

“HP’s transparency was unprecedented in what I’ve heard from a major tech company in the last few years,” Moorhead told VentureBeat.  ”The reality is that every big company turnaround takes at least five years no matter how hard or how much emphasis a company places on it.”

Where is the magic HP sauce when you need it?

In addition, I’m not sure the focus Whitman is looking for translates incredibly well into the business units.

The major segments outlined in HP’s release include HP Enterprise Services and HP Enterprise Group (that couldn’t cause any confusion, could it?), HP Printing and Personal Systems (a group with two foci, one built on printer ink and the other on a decreasing traditional PC market, and neither speaking to the key area of consumer growth: mobile), HP Software (big, profitable, and growing), and HP Converged Cloud (also growing).

There would seem to be a lot of distraction in those five business units that is not in line with Whitman’s core strategic priorities. Not to mention some overlap.

“HP fundamentally must answer three strategic leadership questions in these areas,” says Moorhead. “HP must lay out a inspiring and aggressive plan for public clouds, PCs in the context of an enterprise company, and smartphones.”

One other problem? The strategy document is dripping with jargon that sounds great but sometimes betrays a fresh-out-of-MBA-school baffle-them-with-bullshit mentality.

For example, can you imagine Steve Jobs saying something like this?

HP initiated a multiyear restructuring designed to realign its cost structure and create investment capacity to drive innovation against its strategic priorities, strengthen market leadership and rebuild its balance sheet while returning capital to shareholders.

Driving innovation is a wonderful thing when you can make it work, but it’s not Miss Daisy and it doesn’t just hop into your car. In plain English, the company is cutting people to save money so that it can invest in new technology, which will hopefully help HP return to some semblance of leadership, be profitable, and make investors richer.

Facing the facts — plain English might help — could help HP focus much more urgently on supporting strength and divesting itself of weakness. The core question is: Can HP return to the HP Way — nimble, fast, innovative … and immensely respected, successful, and profitable?

Perhaps, but based on this announcement, I’m not optimistic.

photo credit: włodi via photopin cc, AtomDocs via photopin cc

But that’s just part of the story.

Poor hiring decisions, clueless management moves, scandals, and crazy acquisitions are all reasons HP, RIM, Yahoo, and BofA are in the running for worst corporate governance of the year.

See all the details in this infographic from the Chamber of Commerce. After reviewing … answer our poll for which one you think is worst!