I would prefer for this to be a lie than for it to turn out for this statement to be true. Surely nobody at Lenovo honestly belived that ad injection improved user experience?
There was one time when I visited my mother. We started her instant messaging program, and we were presented with special offers. I recognized it as such within half a second, so I almost automatically checked the 'Do not show this again' checkbox.
My mother alarmed me: "No, do not make it go away! I want to see the offers, they're useful!"
I was mindblown.
Another example: I have snail mail advertisements. But my girlfriend, who's living with me now, asked me to sign up for advertisements such as supermarket special offers. Another mindblown.
Why would you not want to sign up to know about what discounts are available at your local grocery store, especially if you frequent it weekly.
I don't really understand why "can be easily faked" is how you're justifying this.
Also records are kept for mail regarding where it was received by the post office (which likely has security cameras), when, who is on the return address and the recipient. There is physical evidence of who has touched a piece of mail such as fingerprints, hair, DNA etc.
This is part of why you don't get 50 letters from nigerian princes each day
So for example, you didn't learn about the existence of cameras via ads - you probably saw your parents or friends shooting photos when you were a child. And you know that the ads of cameras you see on the web are offering subpar products, and you're better off searching for a camera that fulfills your needs yourself.
Another example, of a relatively new category - iBeacons. You probably read about them on the Internet, or maybe in a magazine like The Economist. Sure, maybe you read an infomercial, but what you've learend is that there is this new category of products, and that they can help you make phones more context-aware. But if you're thinking about what beacons to buy, you are again better off researching yourself and consciously ignoring anything that looks like an ad.
It's definitely better than the ads that ghostery blocked, but ads aren't going away and they were still important to the discovery process.
Is that Canon ad on HBR relevant to me? Are Canon cameras subpar?
I hate many ads too but I'll seek out discounts when I think they might exist.
My mother recently told me how she's tired of keeping track of prices (or price/quality tradeoff) in 5+ different shops - she can save a lot of money and buy good quality products at the same time as long as she knows what to buy where. But she's doing bulk shopping. I probably wouldn't bother walking around the hood to get one item cheaper.
In contrast, Internet advertising offers me pretty much nothing of interest.
I can see the marketing folks honestly believing this. See, the problem with people in marketing is that they come up with ideas that sound good in theory but neglect to consider the implications.
"Wouldn't it be great if I was presented with offers to buy things based on context clues in the web pages I'm browsing?"
"Wouldn't it be great if I didn't have to enter passwords all the time?"
After the marketing brainstorm session the engineers are asked "can this be done?" And the answer is usually "Yes, but..." This is the point at which the marketing droid zones out. "Make it so!"
So yes, I do believe someone in marketing thought this was a great idea. And if it worked perfectly without compromising security, it probably would be a good idea. But there's always compromises in technology, and the marketers either can't grasp or don't care about the consequences.
Good business is about providing value for proper compensation. If you're trying to trick your customer into paying more money for less value, you're just scamming them.
But here, in this particular case, you clearly have bad intentions with a side order of criminal negligence.
See the funny thing is that I've worked in the PC making business and the parts business (Newegg) and the way this software makes it into the preload is not because of marketing, it's a product or finance decision. Hardware is a low margin business so you get paid to add in some pre-installed software and structure some revenue sharing deals. Lenovo isn't lying when it said that it wasn't financially meaningful; in fact, that's probably why they stopped installing it (not because they did some survey of users, etc.).
I don't think any reasonably competent marketer would ever suggest installing some adware as a "feature" so that they could market it. The fact that people are only finding out about this Superfish now meant that Lenovo and Lenovo marketing didn't advertise it's existence. Can someone show me some marketing material that say's "Lenovo PCs, now with more Superfish to enhance your online shopping experience."?
That's not really where I was going with it, just pointing out that sales and marketing start out with reasonable "what if I could..." scenarios and don't really care about the implementation.
> I don't think any reasonably competent marketer would ever suggest installing some adware as a "feature" so that they could market it.
You're right, because they don't think at the implementation level. What I think _did_ happen, if my experience is any indication, is that someone said "I think showing users suggested products would be a tremendous value add! Let the eggheads figure out how to do it." What you end up with is what needs to be done at a technical level in order to fulfill marketing's requirements. It ain't always pretty.
Sounds a lot like Google ;-)
Take Uber, for example. It's apparently a popular ride-sharing service, which I've only heard of recently due to a bunch of articles about them getting into trouble with the law. So how did that service get to be so popular to begin with? How did people first hear of them? I'm guessing that there were lots of banner ads for them all over the web, which I've never seen.
Of course, my curiosity as to what goods and services I might be missing out on is not strong enough to cause me to turn off Adblock, because good lord, the web user experience is horrible without it.
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