Lenovo Is Having the Most Hilariously Terrible 2015
Going into 2015, who would you have predicted to have the worst year in tech? Maybe Comcast and Time Warner Cable, whose merger appears headed for the toilet? Maybe Samsung, which is having increasing troubles fighting off Apple’s iPhone? Maybe BlackBerry, which might not make it to see the next U.S. president sworn in?
Those would have been safe bets. But wait! Who is this? From out of nowhere, a new competitor is speeding down the tracks! Ladies and gentlemen, it’s Lenovo! Where did it come from?!
Yeah, it’s been that bad for Lenovo. Until 2015, the Beijing-based company enjoyed booming laptop sales, big profits, and relative anonymity. If customers associated the brand with anything, it was probably with its sturdy if unremarkable Thinkpad computers. Meanwhile, Lenovo sold more laptops than anyone else did in both 2013 and 2014, snagging the lead from HP and then keeping it.
Heading into 2015, Lenovo looked like a quiet giant, a mega-profitable mega-corporation that was growing into its leader’s position. It must have been feeling good about itself. Confident. Strong. Surging.
This is my impression of Lenovo’s 2015 so far:
You might not have expected Lenovo, of all companies, to be having the Worst Year Ever. But boy, is it! Its year so far has been hilariously, hallucinatorily awful. What happened? Is Phil Jackson running this company?
You’ve probably heard, at least peripherally, of Lenovo’s Superfish problem, which started as a minnow and is now a bloodthirsty killer death shark. Lenovo, in a flash of inspiration somewhere between evil and incompetent, preinstalled a piece of adware/malware called Superfish onto its own computers. This left Lenovo owners vulnerable to both obnoxious ads and — when it was discovered that this crapware contained major security holes — cyberattacks. Here are some of the headlines that have been written since:
“Lenovo’s Superfish spectacle: ‘Catastrophic’ security failures discovered”
“Lenovo’s Superfish Scandal Is One of the Worst Consumer Computing Screw-Ups Ever”
“Lenovo Superfish: Corporate greed meets cluelessness”
These aren’t tabloids howling at pedestrians in an attempt to sell newspapers, or clickbait factories trying to drum up outrage: These headlines came from the sober-headed writers at ZDNet, Slate, and Infoworld. Not exactly J. Jonah Jameson rags.
If all of this wasn’t bad enough –– the negative press, the loss of consumer trust, the invectives and howls –– now the Lenovo Superfish story is reaching a humiliating denouement. The company’s chief technology officer was forced to write an apology, which included the admission that the Superfish software “frustrated some users without adding value to the experience.” A class-action lawsuit has been brought against Lenovo. And on Wednesday evening, the hacking group Lizard Squad broke into the Lenovo.com website and replaced the homepage with a “slideshow of disaffected youths, set to the song ‘Breaking Free’ from High School Musical.” Here’s a screenshot:
This is probably not what the company imagined for its homepage two months into 2015. Nor could anyone really conceive that Lenovo –– boring, steady Lenovo –– would inspire such ire, nor attract the attention of one of the Net’s most notorious hacking groups.
But that’s what happens when you prioritize advertising dollars over a quality computing experience, and also when that prioritization is such a catastrophic, New York Knicks-ian failure.
A lesson to other computer makers whose reputations are solid if unspectacular: Don’t preload your machines with an application that is bad for your customers but good for you. It’s lonely at the bottom, but I’m sure Lenovo would enjoy the company.
