Tech stocks ended the first trading week of 2012 on an upbeat note even though both Forrester and Gartner this week forecast slowing growth in IT spending, due mainly to concerns about the global economy.

After a rollercoaster ride on the stock market, tech companies are ending the year just about where they started, despite strong and in some cases record sales and profits for IT bellwethers.

The spectacle of Hewlett-Packard replacing CEO Leo Apotheker, who had been in the job just a year, with former eBay chief Meg Whitman this week all but obscured solid earnings reports from a range of enterprise software vendors including Oracle, Tibco and Red Hat.

Though signs for IT remain positive this year, worries about the economy sapped investor confidence this week as a wide range of businesses, including big computer industry vendors, suffered a drop in share value.

You've heard the Gen Y stereotypes before: They're lazy workers, exude entitlement and have been reared on social technologies that they bring into the workplace, whether IT departments like it or not.

Given all the hype SaaS (software as a service) has garnered, you might be inclined to think every category of software will be delivered predominantly from the cloud at some point. Not so, says a new Forrester Research report.

Microsoft’s latest operating system Windows 7 has been out for more than a year, but Australia’s Federal Parliament will ignore the release in the short term and is instead in the process of upgrading to its much-maligned predecessor, Windows Vista.

Social marketing can yield lucrative business conversions, but online retailers are still in the early days of adoption, according to a Forrester report.

Most CIOs have started considering virtual desktop infrastructure and other types of desktop virtualization, but only a minority has reached the deployment stage. (See related story, "As Windows 7 gains steam, VDI set to rise".) Virtual desktops can potentially provide more flexibility for users, make it easier to apply patches and reduce IT help desk calls, but there are still numerous problems that keep desktop pros up at night. Here are five pitfalls to watch out for.