Just over the past week, we’ve been struck by the fact that after in-house development efforts came up short, companies simply reached out of house for other companies that were doing the same thing – only better. In one case, it was to buy; in another case, it was just to partner.

Take Hewlett-Packard’s purchase earlier this week of Vertica Systems. (Subscribers can see our full report on the transaction, including our estimates of the undisclosed deal terms.) The purchase came just three weeks after HP said it was phasing out its Neoview platform, which never caught on in the otherwise fast-growing data-warehousing market. (We’re just guessing, but the move might have also been rooted in personal reasons, as well as financial reasons. Neoview was closely associated with HP’s former CEO Mark Hurd, who has been taking shots at his former shop ever since he joined Oracle.)

Although that acquisition doesn’t entirely line up with Nokia’s ‘strategic alliance’ with Microsoft, there are more than a few echoes. In both cases, a tech giant – armed with tens of millions of R&D dollars, not to mention dozens of engineers dedicated to the effort – was in danger of slipping into irrelevancy in an explosively growing market. The agreements represented dramatic about-faces for HP and Nokia. But that’s probably better than both trying to put a good face on what the market has said is a losing effort.