These three companies are headed to the graveyard

Seas boiling! Skies falling! The dead rising from the grave! Yes, we are all sensitive to apocalyptic and eerie portents and signs on Halloween. That looming dread is part of the fun. It’s a great counterpoint to the sugar-rush/comedown portion of the holiday. “Horror, then sweets” goes the formula.

The world might not be ending and the dead might not be rising from the grave on Halloween 2011, but for some technology businesses, it certainly feels that way. As the year careens to a close, consumer spending remains tepid and the competitive landscape in a number of technologies — especially mobile devices — is changing with alarming speed. If Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) and Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) are the happy trick-or-treaters in tech, then who are the publicly traded ghouls and goblins of the day? Consider these lost souls:

Research In Motion

Can changing tastes and an unwillingness to change be considered a curse? Judging from the company’s performance over the past 12 months, it certainly seems that Research In Motion (NASDAQ:RIMM) is living under a bad moon. The BlackBerry maker has seen share prices crumble from $70 in February to below $21 as of Monday. The pre-crash trading price of $145, hit around July 2008, seems a distant memory.

While RIM didn’t diss a gypsy queen to earn its declining fate, it has failed to transform its smartphone business and enterprise services into competitive products that can go head-to-head with Apple’s popular products or the openness of Google Android-powered devices. RIM’s share of the global smartphone market shrank from 19% to 14% over the past year. It isn’t coming back, either. Research firm IDC expects that share to shrink to 13% by 2015. RIM’s lonely future is to be devoured by a competitor for its juicy patents.

Hewlett-Packard

If zombie stocks are all too real, then Hewlett-Packard (NYSE:HPQ) is one of the recently bitten unfortunates that’s slowly transforming into a shambling, undead beast. After two years of pig-headed, multi-billion dollar acquisitions like Palm and 3com, HP has had a miserable 2011. Months of falling PC sales, the bizarre failure of its TouchPad tablet and the departure of CEO Leo Apotheker have all left the company without a clear sense of identity or direction.

This bad news came to a head in August when HP lowered its EPS forecast for the year from $5 to around $4.86, Apotheker was booted, and the company announced it would leave both the PC and mobile businesses.

Now it appears that HP plans to shamble forward in the same way it has. New CEO Meg Whitman has decided to keep the company in the PC business and plans another rush at the tablet market with a device powered by Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) Windows 8. The problem is that PC sales, according to Gartner and IDC, are going to grow at a slower and slower pace over the next four years, and the iPad is expected to hold on to a majority share of the tablet market.?Run if you happen to hear shuffling feat and a mournful moan in the night of “consuuuumer PC sales revenuuuue.”

TiVo

Of all the companies presented in this bestiary, TiVo (NASDAQ:TIVO) is the only one whose corporate mascot is legitimately terrifying. That creepy little TV character is precisely the sort of thing you do not want to run into in a pumpkin patch around midnight.

As for the company itself: TiVo peaked in 2000, three years after the company was incorporated and just months after its IPO. The business was sound and exciting. No one had offered digital video recording service before, and it appeared the market for TiVo set top boxes and subscription service was wide open. This was before Comcast ( NASDAQ:CMCSA), Time Warner (NYSE:TWX) and literally every other premium television service began offering DVR as a standard feature for subscribers.

Considering TiVo had just 2 million subscribers left in March 2011 — the company’s peak subscribership was above 4.3 million in 2006 — and the company is shedding subscribers to the tune of 200,000 per quarter, it’s difficult to see TiVo as anything more than a faded brand haunting the tech industry until it finally disappears.

The stock is as deceptive as a ghost, too. TIVO actually is performing better now than it was at its 2006 subscribership peak. Recent gains, however, came after the company announced it planned a buyback of $100 million in common shares (likely a ploy to muster investor interest and confidence) and an influx of $500 million won in a patent lawsuit settlement with Dish Network (NASDAQ:DISH). But TiVo has reported losses in 10 of the past 11 quarters — that, if nothing else, should scare investors.

As of this writing, Anthony John Agnello did not own a position in any of the stocks named here. Follow him on Twitter at?@ajohnagnello?and?become a fan of?InvestorPlace on Facebook.