Fright night: This year's biggest horror stories

We mark Halloween by running through 2011's biggest nightmares. Read on if you dare

Ah, Halloween. Spotty little oiks knocking on your door and demanding sweets; defacing perfectly edible pumpkins; covering yourself in old sheets and fake blood - what's not to love?

We here at ChannelWeb are big fans of the year's spookiest day, and to mark the occasion we have compiled a list of this year's scariest tales. It has been a hell of a year for the industry's biggest vendors, incorporating epic technology fails, management musical chairs, financial horrors and operational buffoonery.

So, why not crawl under the covers, fire up your torch and peek through your fingers at our rundown of 2011's top five horror stories? This lot certainly had a nightmare, and you might too once you've finished reading.

5. Microsoft
It has been an up-and-down year for the software industry's biggest fish. Over the summer its BPOS suite of cloud applications angered customers with a series of outages.

Office 365, the successor to BPOS, was launched in June amid great fanfare. Within two months it had generated negative publicity of its own with (wait for it...) a serious outage in North America. Whoops.

But, following some not-so-subtle hints from boss man Steve Ballmer, Microsoft recently showed off some of the features of the upcoming Windows 8 operating system, to a generally warm response. Good for you, Steve.

Here's hoping those pesky kids don't ruin your Halloween by turning up dressed as the ghost of Bill Gates again.

Fright factor: 6


4. HP
A year of unhelpful headlines for the vendor began last summer when former CEO Mark Hurd (pictured) resigned, having been investigated over sexual harassment and expenses-fiddling claims.

His hapless replacement, Léo Apotheker, lasted less than a year, as his strategy went down like a lead balloon with investors and market watchers. The coup de grâce for the former SAP man was telling all and sundry that the world's biggest PC maker was exiting the PC game. Rivals are still making hay with the uncertainty over its systems division.

After being sent on his way with nothing but his tail between his legs and a derisory $13m (£8.1m) severance package, one can only assume Apotheker spends his days shuffling around the streets of Silicon Valley like a member of the undead, feasting on flesh. Lobster, mostly.

Fright factor: 7

3. RSA
The enterprise security specialist suffered the most high profile of a number of security breaches to take place this year.

After coming under attack in March, the EMC-owned firm admitted customer Lockheed Martin's details had been compromised. A barrage of snipes from opportunistic rivals followed, while analysts blasted RSA for its response to the attack. Some partners even talked of their disgruntlement with the vendor.

The security vendor chalked up the breach to an advanced persistent threat, but we at ChannelWeb haven't ruled out witchcraft.

Fright factor: 7.5

2. Acer
HP hasn't been the only PC maker in the mire this year. Its Taiwanese rival also endured an unexpected management shake-up, as its sales and market share fell off a cliff and it accrued a $150m surfeit of stock in EMEA.

In March its chief executive Gianfranco Lanci (pictured) walked after a disagreement over strategy with the rest of the board. Two months later the vendor wrote off the cost of the mountain of excess PCs in Europe.

All the while the firm has dropped from the brink of being the globe's biggest PC manufacturer to a distant fourth. With Lanci (who, let's face it, could totally pull off a vampire costume) now at rival Lenovo, don't be surprised to see more of Acer's lifeblood sucked out this year.

Fright factor: 8

1. RIM
The BlackBerry maker has endured the mother of all bad PR years. With sales of its increasingly archaic-looking technology struggling to ignite, the vendor issued a profit warning in April. It must have hoped that the release of its tablet offering, the PlayBook, would have reversed its fortunes, but the device met with a lukewarm reaction from critics and the buying public.

The vendor's ongoing troubles led to a cull of 2,000 jobs, announced in July. And, as if that wasn't enough, the role played by the BBM service in organising the riots in August can hardly have helped RIM shake its image problem.

The Canadian vendor must have thought things could only get better but, unfortunately, the worst was yet to come, with the four-day outage of BMM and email services last month.

Amid all this, RIM's share price chart for the past 12 months resembles the first 10 seconds of a rollercoaster. And, to top it all, Apple debuted iMessage, its BBM rival, around the same time BlackBerry succumbed to the outage. IT execs could be scaring their children with this tale for many years to come.
Fright factor: 9