It’s a little stunning to contemplate how wrong things have gone for Google (NSDQ: GOOG) in just the first month of 2012, as the company hopes to put a disastrous January in the rear-view mirror with perhaps another tear-jerking Super Bowl ad this Sunday.

Even if you throw the exploding tablet market in with the staid PC market, shipments of smartphones surpassed those of “client PCs” in 2011, a milestone for the computer industry.

When Apple first released its free iBooks Author software, some were upset about its end-user licensing agreement, which states that works created in the program must be sold exclusively through Apple (NSDQ: AAPL).

About.com is in free fall. The New York Times (NYSE: NYT) revealed yesterday that its network of information sites suffered a 67% drop in profits and that revenues had fallen by a quarter.

The U.S. government likes to do things its own way. Along those lines, it has decided to embrace Android as a smartphone platform for soldiers and other government employees because of the control it can exert over the software, which in turn underscores how much control Android partners have over the software.

Books-A-Million—the nation’s second largest bookstore chain after Barnes & Noble (NYSE: BKS)—announced today that, like B&N, it will not carry Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) Publishing titles in its stores.

It was five years ago that Nokia (NYSE: NOK) executives brushed off the idea of Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) as “not a threat” to Nokia’s top position in mobile sales.

Facebook has made a $3.1 billion business from a social advertising sector many, even it, concede is experimental and unproven.

»  Facebook’s biggest risks explained (ReadWriteWeb)

»  Is Facebook’s IPO the start of something, or the end? (GigaOm)

»  Zuckerberg claims “We don’t build services to make money” (Forbes)

»  IPO filing says that Zynga accounted for 12% of Facebook’s revenue in 2011 (TNW)

»  From founders to decorators, Facebook riches (NYT)

Facebook‘s nearly 200-page S-1 filing appears to have crippled the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Edgar website with the mass of people going there to take a peek at the social network’s numbers.