10 IT news stories to expect in 2012

Well, we erred in our 2011 predictions in not repeating a 2010 forecast that Carol Bartz would be ousted as Yahoo CEO -- it was bound to happen, we just called that one too early. Then again, we also predicted last year that Oracle would buy Salesforce.com and have decided not to repeat ourselves this year, so we'll see if we were just ahead on that one, too. Meanwhile, these are our predictions for the next 12 months:

HP gets its groove back

Meg Whitman will be the needed tonic at Hewlett-Packard, which will regain its focus and footing over the course of 2012, showing steady, if slow, improvement. And, contrary to popular sentiment, webOS won't die, but will find support in the open-source community of code writers and tinkerers. Read more...