The company tried to initially mellow down the security lapse, but acted swiftly to own up and provide solution to completely remove SuperFish from the affected consumer laptops. In a freshly issued open letter, Lenovo’s CTO, Peter Hortensius, has again apologized for the SuperFish mess and has sought a week to develop a concrete plan to address software vulnerabilities and security with defined actions.
SuperFish: Blessing in disguise?
These don’t mean much to the end users, but what really matters is what follows that action plan. Hortensius talks about Lenovo exploring a wide range of options that include:
creating a cleaner PC image (the operating system and software that is on your device right out of the box); working directly with users, privacy/security experts and others to create the right preload strategy quickly; and soliciting and assessing the opinions of even our harshest critics in evaluating our products going-forward.
What this essentially means is that we can expect much cleaner, bloat-free PCs from Lenovo going forward. Over the years, almost every single OEM has been shipping Windows laptops full of bloatware in leu of few bucks to improve their quarterly bottom-line. With SuperFish, Lenovo, the biggest OEM, has been forced to do some soul searching.
— Lenovo (@lenovo) February 24, 2015 If indeed Lenovo manages to cut down the bloat and ships a cleaner bloat-free Windows OS with each of their consumer laptops, it has to be the best news for users in a long long time. In this age of SSDs, it’s not just the security and privacy which are at stake, but the amount of free storage space available for users out of the box. By the end of this month, Lenovo should be coming out with their action plan to cut down the flab of their Windows installation image, and we hope this forces other major players to act as well.
