It’s been a month of controversial news from HP.

When the HP Touchpad was first launched in June, it didn’t do well at all. Lopping off a US$100 discount didn’t move inventory, and TouchPads languished on retailer shelves.

So HP made a drastic move during their recent quarterly announcement in mid-August: they announced the firesale of their Touchpads for US$99, and the discontinuation of all WebOS products like the Touchpad.

Result: a mad rush for HP Tablets, and HP hinting that they might resurrect the Tablet, ostensibly so as not to burn bridges with suppliers.

And oh, they made the small announcement that HP, the number one desktop vendor, was thinking of exiting the PC business entirely.

Pandemonium ensued. HP’s share prices dropped 20 percent on 19th August as investors didn’t take nicely to HP’s sudden jarring unexpected announcement.

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Everybody is looking at social media as the next gold rush.

It’s not surprising, given that social media has moved beyond the consumer space and into the enterprise.

At a press event last week, infrastructure software company TIBCO showed off Tibbr 3.0, an social media platform for enterprises that will be available in August 2011.

Tibbr was launched in January this year after being in development since 2009.

It may be a little bit late to the game though, and gaining mindshare will be difficult as the market is quite crowded.

There are a ton of niche companies who specialize in this space like Yammer and Socialcast.

Not to mention all the big IT companies, who all have solutions or are looking at this space, like IBM (with Connections and Lotus Live) and Microsoft (with Office 365 and Officetalk) and Salesforce.com (with Chatter).

So what makes Tibbr different?

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Two bungling engineers and a faulty cable brought down Singapore’s biggest bank DBS — all of the ATMs, internet banking — for about 7 hours last month on 5th July.

Or so that was the narrative painted by the Straits Times two days ago on Thursday that it was all due to human error. (There’s a far lengthier version in the printed Straits Times version than the gimped version online). The big headline inside the paper on page four was this: “It was definitely a human error”.

Really? Is that the best narrative that explained why the system crashed that day? Everything was due to “human error”, and two “bungling” IBM engineers were to blame?

If Singapore’s biggest bank could so easily be brought down by “human errors”, then I find it genuinely shocking. Surely IBM’s 10-year S$1.2 billion outsourcing contract — about S$120 million per year to maintain the IT infrastructure — details a stringent process for disaster recovery?

Doesn’t DBS and IBM have SLAs that spell out how IT failures should be recovered from, with a detailed escalation process? And seriously, a single misplugged cable can bring down your entire storage system? I don’t buy this at all. You’re not talking about a start-up servicing a bank; you’re talking about a maintenance contract deal worth millions.

Thus, the main point is not about “human error” — a totally wrongheaded slant that ST took, in my opinion — but the fact that DBS’ business process screwed up along the way. Yes, human error may have started this, but the recovery process screwed up and failed to kick in.

The blow-by-blow account of how engineers triggered this failure is not interesting. What’s interesting would have been how and why DBS’s disaster recovery process failed to kick in.

In the past, when I went to one of IBM’s Smarter Planet events I found it hard to write something and distill the message for readers.

At the back of my brain was always this burning question: Just what is IBM selling here? I have difficulty connecting their really big picture green IT story to what they do as a technology company.

Let me set the context and take a short detour to explain why. I’m better known as a technology journalist-blogger hybrid, but I worked for a very brief time at the Centre for Liveable Cities in Singapore. In that short stint I gained an appreciation of the complex problems facing cities.

Different cities face different problems, depending on how developed a city is. A developed megalopolis like New York or Tokyo will face vastly different challenges than say, Hanoi, Vietnam or Sao Paulo, Brazil. And this is only one one aspect of a city. Culturally, economically, politically, every city is different and will have different issues.

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The future of business collaboration is in web-based social networks, and software vendors of all stripes are all stampeding to gain mindshare in this space.

For example, IBM has LotusLive, Microsoft has their Azure platform, and Google has Google Apps.

And at a media event today, Salesforce.com folks talked about their upcoming launch of Chatter, yet another Facebook-like social networking collaboration platform, this time for their Salesforce.com customer base.

According to Jeremy Cooper, Asia Pacific’s regional VP for marketing at Salesforce.com, Chatter will be live by the middle of this year. It was announced last year in November 2009, and is currently already available for developers in a private beta. I’ll let their Chatter YouTube video explain what it is all about:

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Two weeks after IBM decided against buying Sun, Oracle announced just hours ago it has sealed the deal to buy Sun. Oracle will pay US$9.50 per share of Sun, 10 cents per share more than what IBM had offered. I knew something was up when I got a late SMS from Sun’s PR to attend an urgent conference call. Wow, this really came out of the BLUE,  pun quite intended.