In Pictures: Top 25 network and IT industry stories of 2012

2012 has been a year of re-invention among the tech industry’s biggest players, with Microsoft overhauling many of its key product lines, most notably Windows, while also boldly entering the hardware market with Surface tablets. Google, too, got directly into the tablet game, and HP slashed its workforce as CEO Meg Whitman reshapes an industry icon that has gone through many shifts in recent years. The transformation to the cloud continued practically unabated (save for those pesky outages!) and suddenly every company seems to be a software-defined something or other, or is snapping up a company that is. Here’s a look back at the eventful year that was.