Tough times for Lenovo as controversies pile on

Aug 17, 2015 08:56 GMT  ·  By

Hit by many bad news affecting the entire Chinese market, Lenovo finds itself at the center of a larger scandal that may affect the company even more.

After its meteoric rise a few years ago after acquiring IBM's PC business and promising to continue the highly popular ThinkPad brand of laptops, Lenovo decided that mobile computing is where the company's future will be placed. To continue this questionable direction, it decided to sell its smartphone division to continue with mobile computing.

However, since the recent market switch in China and the increased focus on smartphones and tablets, Lenovo's plans proved to be wrong and the company hurried to buy back its former assets at twice the price it sold them initially. To solidify this aim, Lenovo also decided to buy from Google what was once Motorola for $2.35 billion in 2014 and restart the once-leading mobile phone company.

Things started to go south pretty soon after the acquisition. First, the Chinese stock markets dropped, and then Apple started to affirm its domination in the smartphone market sector leaving behind most, if not all Android smartphone manufacturers. The hardest hit of them all was HTC, facing massive layoffs and being close to liquidation. Massive drops in sales were felt at Samsung and Lenovo as well, but while Samsung is buffered by extended businesses in many other market sectors, Lenovo has been hit hard by bad press at the core of its main PC applications.

Lenovo should've kept from making the same mistake twice

After many accusations at the start of this year about the Superfish bloatware that wouldn't be removed even after a clean install, Lenovo did promise to end the preinstallation bloatware across its entire industry and start anew with a new software ethics in mind. Ars Technica, however, caught Lenovo red-handed again after the scandal with another set of bloatware that re-installs after a clean install of the operating system.

Although being a less invasive anti-theft technique that makes use of the anti-theft technology built into Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 together with Windows 10, the LoJack software injects itself into the operating system even after a clean installation. LoJack or Computrace is a piece of software usually found in business laptops to aid in anti-theft solutions and surveillance. Useful for companies that want to protect their own hardware, this sort of systems is also sold to individuals by manufacturers, breaking away from any form of personal intimacy that they are ethically bound to.

To make sure that any unwanted software is removed after a clean install, it's best to run Lenovo's LSE removal tool, in order to have the files cleared from their hard disks.

Reviving the ThinkPads won't increase Lenovo's reliability overnight

When having this sort of consumer-related issues, Lenovo will surely lose long-time fans that have supported the company in improving its mobile computing business. For them, such underhanded actions are perceived as treason from the company, and Lenovo's sales are very likely to suffer.

To add even more insult to injury, Lenovo plans to revive the old ThinkPads to cater to old time fans and increase its popularity again among mobile computing customers. However, after such bloatware scandals, it's unlikely people will flock that easily to buy the ThinkPads when their computers will suffer from unwanted software, and will eventually choke their available DRAM when a system becomes uselessly cluttered.

Lenovo isn't faring pretty good these days, and after firing around 3,200 staff, which means about five percent of its workforce, it's clear that only blaming the market environment won't justify the failures of a company that mismanages much beloved brands like ThinkPad and Motorola.