Lenovo Superfish saga 'hugely damaging', says analyst
Adware 'PR disaster' brings issue of Chinese ownership back to the fore, Context co-founder Jermey Davies tells CRN
An analyst has predicted that the fallout from the Lenovo Superfish firestorm will be "hugely damaging".
Talking to CRN, Context co-founder Jeremey Davies (pictured) said Lenovo will now have to redouble its efforts to convince corporate customers its Chinese ownership does not pose a security threat.
Lenovo confirmed yesterday it ceased pre-loading consumer laptops with the controversial third-party 'adware' Superfish in January amid complaints from customers and concerns the practice was compromising security.
This morning, Lenovo's US Twitter account, @LenovoUS, issued a grovelling apology linking through to instructions to determine whether users have the Superfish application installed and how to uninstall it.
"We're sorry. We messed up. We're owning it. And we're making sure it never happens again. Fully uninstall Superfish," the tweet read.
Davies said misgivings over Lenovo's Chinese ownership could resurface if the vendor doesn't put a lid on the episode quickly.
"From a PR perspective, this is a disaster," he said.
"If you go back in history, when Lenovo bought IBM's PC business [in 2005], people were worried about what a Chinese company buying a US firm would mean for safety, security and spyware. It got through that. The same questions were raised again when it bought IBM's server business, and for the past month or so, it's gone quiet.
"This brings that issue right to the fore again. Obviously there's no malice there but what on earth were they thinking? They've now got a job to do to re-establish confidence in people's eyes."
Davies said the saga is unlikely to hit Lenovo's sales but could at least make corporate buyers jittery.
"Let's see what the fallout is over the next couple of weeks." he said. "Any CIO at a large corporate is going to see this and think, 'that's silly', and will look for reassurance. Whichever way you look at it, it's not good."