Lenovo climbs mount stupid, plants a flag and takes a selfie.

This is a lesson about greed, bad communications and stupidity. Somewhere deep inside the executive offices of computer giant Lenovo, somebody had an ingenious plan: Let’s extract more money from our customers.

To refresh your memory, Lenovo has long been a manufacturer of desktop computers, laptops and other electronics. The company first came to the spotlight when it purchased the laptop (remember ThinkPads? Yes they are still around) division from IBM, phones from Motorola/Google and the latest, the Intel-based server business from IBM. One of the reasons, IBM had sold the laptop business to Lenovo, was that it had rapidly become a commodity business with shrinking margins. Lenovo is a company that relies on doing large volumes of sales and can still make money in that market space.

So, let’s go back to this ingenious plan from Lenovo. I am sure that you are aware that while you are browsing the Internet there are numerous ads you will be exposed to. Sometimes you notice them but most of the time, you do not. These ads are served to your screen by internet behemoths like Google. The braintrust at Lenovo came up with a brilliant idea. They said, “Why don’t we intercept the ads which others are serving and insert our own. We can make lot’s of money !”. Interesting idea. The parallel would be a local TV station inserting its own commercials to a national broadcast of major network without any formal agreement or discussion. This of course would be illegal, but the Internet doesn’t care about such technicalities.

How exactly did Lenovo do this? They used an application from Superfish, a software company that intercepts all the traffic between your browser and the website you were visiting. What’s wrong with this picture? First – it was preinstalled on your computer and like millions of other Lenovo customers, told absolutely nothing about it. Second – you bought your computer to use it, not to become a proxy money-making machine for Lenovo. Third – the most serious issue being security. In order to intercept secure traffic (say, between you and your bank), Superfish created a fake security certificate on the fly to prevent your browser from raising any security alert. Your computer is a prime target for hackers and thanks to Lenovo, Superfish would have access to all the information hackers need.

Now this information about Lenovo’s practices has become public and the backlash has begun, Lenovo has started PR damage control campaign and has, so they say, remotely disabled the offending software.

Lenovo, you supposed to provide quality, trusted equipment to your customers. They pay you for that. You failed them on both counts.