Where is the professionalism Lenovo?
Late in the evening on Thursday June 21st I was browsing my Facebook “timeline” and came across an interesting post from a friend of mine. Essentially my friend was looking at the Outlet website for Lenovo and while using their compare laptops feature, he discovered a very friendly message from Lenovo. I didn’t believe him at all, I mean this is Lenovo we’re talking about…
So I decided I better take a look at this myself and low and behold, he was right. Essentially if you didn’t select 2 or more laptops to compare on the site, a JavaScript alert message was presented to tell you that you needed to select more. Pretty simple, right? Or maybe not?
Please select two or more items to compare. Asshole.I took a screenshot of the message from my iPhone and decided to post a tweet on the matter as shown below… https://twitter.com/RussSolberg/status/216050216829337601 This tweet went viral I guess. It’s been re-tweeted well over 1400 times and favorited by over 250 people. Scores of people reposted a similar message and my timeline has been going nuts for 4 days with responses. I didn’t make it up… I didn’t photoshop it (not good enough to do that)… Which is sad… As a developer, I would do all kinds of modifications and changes to the code to make sure what was executing was really what was desired. But NEVER and I mean NEVER in that time did I ever decided to start lacing my code with unprofessional profanities. First, there is no reason for that to ever be in code. Second, mistakes can happen and even with the most stringent of code reviews and mod analysis before checking code into SVN/GIT/VSS/TFS/etc. things can get missed. So why risk it? So the million dollar question then becomes, was it a mistake or a disgruntled employee leaving a mark? I’m not sure we’ll ever know and Lenovo probably won’t ever tell us. But either way, it was highly unprofessional and should be something that ALL developers and authors of code should keep in mind. Lenovo’s response on the matter has been interesting. They didn’t initially see my tweet, but saw a message I posted on their Facebook “page”. I kindly suggested that they might want to have QA test the compare feature on the Outlet site. By mid-morning on Friday they hid the compare feature which other twitter users were able to spot with Firebug and subsequently they removed the entire feature from the page. Lenovo apologized to me directly on the matter and also made a couple of tweets on the subject.
Sincere apologies to those who saw profane language on our website–it’s been removed. Thanks for your understanding & continued dialogue.
— Lenovo(@lenovo) June 22, 2012
I just looked this morning and the entire compare feature is still completely missing. They’ve now had over an entire business day to simply delete one word. They were able to delete the entire feature pretty quick, so you’d think a removal of a single word would even be faster. I’m perplexed that it isn’t back up yet, this isn’t a rinky dink company we’re talking about, it is Lenovo!We are working diligently to discover the source of the message & ensure it won’t happen again. Apologies, thanks and happy weekend to all.
— Lenovo(@lenovo) June 22, 2012
Tags: Asshole, Lenovo, Professionalism, Twitter
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Comments (6)
Faidon Liambotis
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So, when you discover that someone’s done something malicious with production code, you just fix the problem you’re getting reports for?
Whether it’s a disgruntled employee or a malicious act by an outsider, the only sensible plan is to take down the code immediately, find who did it and under which circumstances, audit your codebase and, if needed, audit the rest of your infrastructure.
Don’t you wonder what else that person might have done with the site? For all we know, he may have backdoored the site and get all of our credit card numbers.
Especially since the effect is limited (i.e. limited functionality vs. entire site/shop down), it’s the right decision for sure.
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Russell
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Faidon – First, there is a big difference between a malicious code modification that actually has high significance to the business and application compared to that of an error message. For example, I’ve built online credit applications and say I were to hijack some pennies from the code and have them shipped to a different bank or something, that’d be a pretty big deal. Slipping some unprofessional grammar into an error message is much more of a PR issue for the company and is generally a very quick fix. In this instance, Lenovo could have very easily just removed the word from the error message.
I didn’t really approach this write up towards how I’d handle the investigation side or what I think Lenovo ought to do going forward. I tend to agree with you that there are far more questions that should be answered and answered quickly for Lenovo to feel comfortable for their tools, especially consumer facing tools.
But in this instance, I really think they could have simply deleted the word rather than initially tagging the div with display:none as some twitter users discovered before ultimately deleting the entire feature.
I would say this in conclusion though, as soon as they heard there was an issue, they jumped on it. They didn’t waste a ton of time to get it off of their site. I might have gone about that fix differently, but to their credit, they did act.
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Siemer
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Programming sites like this can be pretty boring. Putting uncharacteristic text or images in a website is one way to make the process a little bit more fun for yourself. I used to do it too when I was less experienced, until colleagues pointed out the potential risks of these little jokes.
Mind you, they did get massive exposure over this, so it could even be a viral strategy.
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Russell
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If it was a viral strategy, it was one where the developer, QA person, dev manager, and the entire marketing department ought to be fired. I don’t feel as though I will ever buy a Lenovo product now. If they can’t manage to keep their only retail space professional, how can I trust the quality of what they’re selling me?
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Russell Solberg
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Update – It appears that twitter has deleted the image I posted in the original tweet. I’ll have to dig it up, but this is crazy. I wonder if Lenovo paid them off?
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J. B. Rainsberger
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It doesn’t surprise me that Lenovo needed a full day to change a single word on a web site. This likely shows us, at least in part, how woefully disorganised their development and deployment systems are. You can measure this in your company by trying to deploy a new, empty web site — in some companies it takes weeks.
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