Christmas and Crapware, OEMs have to listen

Are the OEM’s ever going to get the message about crapware, I went to Bestbuy for a look around Saturday and I noticed tons and tons of open box desktop, notebook computers of all makes, the mark downs on these units were minimal, but it looks like they may be heading to the refurb farm because nobody is going to want them unless there is a substantial mark down, the return line was huge and I saw plenty of people with computers, I decided to ask a lady in line with a HP Elite she was returning, after talking to her for a while she revealed that she and her family are not very tech savvy, but she knows when there is a problem, she told me the computer was slow, things kept popping up advertising something or demanding a credit card for full versions of some software on the machine, there were tool bars on top of tool bars, there were annoying things scrolling across the desktop she did not know how to stop, her final thought were, I paid big money for something that is slow and annoying right out of the box, and there is no way she is going to pay some geek squad any f-ing money for something that should run well right out of the box, I agreed and sympathized with her, and I said good for her returning the box, she had every right to toss back that computer to the seller, people want a new computer that will work right out of the box without having to be too tech savvy, Im glad to see all these boxes being returned, as I found most were being returned for performance issues which were most likely caused by crapware, are the OEM’s listening, or do they care as long as they get some cash from the crapware maker, the HP this lady had, was equipped with 8 gigs ram, Intel Q9300 quad core, Nvidia 9800GT with 512 megs, this box should fly and it will fly after a good clean install, but like I said these people aren’t tech savvy like most members on this site are tech savvy and know what to do, but it was good to see that people are just tossing the boxes back for refunds, the word is Sony will be crapware free by summer, at least somebody’s listening.

 

HP seems to be the biggest offender. They did a pretty good job at making the Media Smart server slow to a crawl with their stupid add-ons. Dell is getting better in my experience. Until they don't make enough on the programs they install they will keep doing it.

 

well the bloatware problem is annoying. thats true. and i hope the vendors will stop pre-installing these unnecessary goodies. most of this stuff is really not worth anything, i´ll give you that.

what makes me wonder a little bit is that sony offers their notebooks "bloatwarefree (tm)"... wasn´t it sony that wanted to have like 20 - 30 bucks to uninstall the bloatware they installed themselves ?

what kind of elitebook is that ? never have seen one equipped like this ... ( the elitebook is the successor of the previous professional notebooks like 6910p/w , 8510p/w , 8710p/w)

 

I suspect OEMs are paid to put Norton and other crapware on their machines.

I do understand the woes of the technology challenged but all it takes is to go to control panel and the add/remove programs tool, app or whatever you want to call it and browse through the list and remove the crapware.

Problem is technology challenged people are largely computer illiterate and too afraid to just look around, what's the worst that could happen? You end up borking your system and you have to take it back to the shop where you bought it.

The technology challenged also have a habit of believing their computer is "faster" than it really is because of the marketing and when they go to crank it up they find out it's not...

My new Asus came with very little crapware (well not counting the fact it's came with Vista) and I was surprised at that but I did have to go through Vista to remove some of the Asus apps I'll never use and of course it had the usual Norton on it...

And Sony may be going crapware free but you can bet they'll add a few £/$ to prices for the revenue they lose through not putting things like Norton on their machines (if they are indeed paid to do so).

 

Even though all they have to do is add/remove to uninstall, there is still remnants of the app still in the registry and in other places which will also cause slowdowns. The point is to have the user not even having to uninstall programs they unwillingly don't want or have to manually clean install it. The consumer should buy a product clean and he/she decides what goes on the machine.

AFAIK, when Win7 hits the markets, ALL OEMs are going to cut down on bloatware.

 

OH I hear you on the Mediasmart Server, I threw in 2 gigs of ram and a LE-1640 just for fun, can you imagine a stock 470/475 running Mcaffee and PVconnect, I dont use any of them, but talk about getting throwen back into the stoneage.

 

I ran it for a bit with the stock 512MB until I got the correct screw driver to install the RAM, but made sure to stay away from the McAffee. I don't understand why they put such low amounts of RAM and then cram it with crappy apps.

 

My father in law bought a Dell Inspiron 1525 thru Best Buy. The spec's he got in the system, and for the price, I thought were excellent. He complained about it being slow. I did a fresh install, performed some of the tweaks from the guide here, and now he is happy as a pig in slop with his machine.

 

Yeah crapware is a real big problem. Especially when doing a clean install is practically impossible thanks to recovery CDs, recovery partitions and no clean install + ONLY drivers discs included in the box. My Acer, Gateway and Sony have all been bad in this respect.

The more computer literate can download an ISO file and use that with the OEM key, but even that is frowned upon. And how do you make sure the ISO file you download is completely 100% with no viruses or malware.

 

It was a desktop

 

The amount of bloat being packaged with systems is really disgusting, and ultimately pointless. The only thing it achieves is upsetting customers.

 

Well if your gonna go that far you might as well buy a PC without an OS and then choose.

The solution, aside from getting rid of crapware, is quite simple, stop marketing technology at people who are technology illiterate and unwilling or afraid to learn (as many are).

Even without crapware people still have problems with their systems because they simply do not have a clue.

I don't know all I could know about computers but I know enough to be able to start to troubleshoot a problem and I know there is a wealth of information out there on the www that I can access if I need to, most people with a home computer don't have the first clue where to even start looking, they see an err msg popup and panic and shut the system down or close the dialog box without taking note of what was displayed!

Getting rid of crapware is a good idea but it doesn't solve the problem of people being computer illiterate and while such people are allowed to buy a PC off the shelf you'll still get people saying "my computer runs slow, what's wrong? I don't know, I'll take it back for a refund."...

 

Well, you can say that quite often it's PEBKAC. But what is still crazy is these insane amounts of badly written software - some 'bloat' is actually useful and well-made, but most of it serves literally no purpose. I clean the computers of friends from crap, give them ever so slight tweaks, install nondemanding security software and aim to give them a good computing experience.

Most of my friends and collegues suck at computers, very much. It's retarded that their new computers have to come with useless stuff that slows down their system, and actually makes the OEM look bad in their eyes.

Overall, useless pre-installeds are so wrong in so many ways it's surprising it's all still around.

 

Depends on your point of view. The problem is that the consumer now wants (demands) $500 desktops and laptops. I'm guessing that the only way a PC maker can compete by price at a big box store like Best Buy where every dollar counts is to get paid by McAfee, Symantec, or whoever, to load this crap on there. A "clean" machine would probably cost the maker $50 to $100 more, and Joe Schmo who knows nothing and shops by price would pass it up for the cheaper one next to it...the one subsidized by junkware.

It's our own fault that junk is on there.

 

The OEM's had the answer back in the mid 90's, all the crapware was on seperate floppies and cd's.

 

I think the main reason they add all the bloatware is to force people to buy the products. Try a trial and omg i need an anti virus. Everytime i buy a computer i always go straight to a reformat to take off the bloatware. It slows the computer. The people that don't know about computers will mostly likely struggle and always say computers are slow. A good fresh clean reformat is almost always the solution to speed it up. I feel sorry for those people that don't know about computers, but thats why i like computers and like i said and a lot mentioned as well easy way is a clean install.

 

ha ha interesting topic indeed!

my family and friends bought nearly 10 computers (both desktops and laptops) in 2008. I was the consulting factor on each of those purchases. I have to tell you the bestbuy or circuitcity guys hated me a lot for blocking them from selling craps to put on the machines. (i like doing that)

most of the machines i got for them were Lenovo ones so i had little time cleaning up those useless stuff pre-installed. Happy customers.

 

Why hire a lawyer when you can search cases and all federal and states' laws are online. Engine stalling on you? Re-jet your carburetor. Hell, rebuild the entire engine. Lights flickering? Rip apart your wall and rewire the house. Hell, why ever go out to a restaurant when you can just cook at home?

You get the point - what's basic for you can be tedious and/or beyond the capabilities of many others, just you would hire others to do any number of activities for you.

 

This is particularly true and apropos for those whom value their time a great deal or lack the patience for such trivialities.

 

Yes all valid points. However if you look at the post I was responding to you will see why I said you may as well buy a PC without an OS and then make the choice...

And I'd love to hire people to do things but I don't have the money.

 

Companies that pre-install the OS should only install bare drivers so the components can run properly.
No extra stupidities pre-installed (put those on a DVD as an option that can be installed later on).

Acer has a lot of bloatware as well, and they partition the hdd in a very stupid manner (space-wise).
Regardless of how much you clean out the OS, remnants of those garbage programs remain on the hdd.
Sure, you clean it all out with TuneUP or CCleaner and everything, but regardless of that, it's still not good.
Oh well, after I got my laptop, I wiped the existing OS along with the recovery, repartitioned to my liking and re-installed (after I gathered the necessary drivers).

I agree the consumer should buy a machine with nothing installed on it ... but problem is with laptops that a lot of these machines do come pre-installed without an option of no OS.
Dekstops are another story.
I don't mess with fully assembled configs anyway.
I prefer to buy separate parts (which for a mid/high end system can end up cheaper) and then assemble/install everything myself.
Simple.

 

This is interesting. Is this a MS decision to force OEM's to remove the bloat if they want to continue getting their oem license discounts? I'm assuming MS would do that to help in their huge perception image of building slow/bloated OS's like with vista. MS wants more control. I mean a clean install of vista boots much faster with less issues. The oem's really messed up vista with their custom configs. I think MS wants to get control of that.

 

I hope they do cut down on bloatware soon. On the Vaio SR I bought for my brother it took me almost 2 hours to clear all the junk and stupid Sony services they had on there (I didn't want to do a clean install because I didn't want to have to hunt down drivers and other stuff to reinstall).

 

No wonder PCs have bad reps with non-technical people. How could they not see this only drags down OEM's and in this case Microsoft XP/Vista in the eyes of the consumer who only want their machine to work out of the box.

 

I've often seen extensive bloatware as an affront to the people who buy pc's. Like, this is supposed to be a pretty big purchase and is a very personal decision for many people. Who want's to feel like their system isn't "there's" that their desktop was auctioned off to the highest bidder?

 

Agreed whole heartedly! When I reinstalled Windows XP on my parents' Dell (this was a year before they started providing no bloatware options) it felt like a completely different machine.

 

Has anyone actually asked an OEM why they stick that stuff on? It strikes me that OEMs are, as a general matter, sufficiently market savvy that they would not put that stuff on if their marketing studies indicated that their purchasers were generally unfavorably disposed to the stuff, so it strikes me that all in all, the balance between customer reaction and cost must continue to favor putting this stuff on.

 

As I alluded to earlier in this thread, it's money. They're paid by the vendors to put trialware/crapware on there. I've read that a "clean" machine would cost a manufacturer in the neighborhood of $50 to $100 per unit depending on the level of garbage installed. The profit margin on a $400 desktop or $600 laptop must be razor thin, and without the "Bloatware Subsidy" they'd have to price it higher.

Now, you may be willing to pay more for a clean machine, but Nick No-Nothing comparing bargain-basement notebooks at Best Buy or Circuit City only sees that one machine is $599, while an identically spec'd machine is $649. Which one is he going to buy?

I think the worst are the units from the big box stores, for reasons stated above. My XPS from Dell really wasn't bad at all, but a brand new HP from best Buy that I had to set up for a client yesterday was horrible. A third of the IE window was already occupied the 3rd-party toolbars right out of the box, and the desktop littered with trial software icons and garbage. Of course, I kept my mouth and set up his printers, email, and apps and moved on.

 

a friend of mine got a hp with lots of crapware on it. he cleaned it all up and all was well and snappy. still, while djing (with traktor 3) on it, he had about 1-3 times an hour a short hickup, very difficult to track down the problem.

a clean reinstall with my cd, and it all was gone..

i hate crapware. i know so much who blame it on vista while vista itself works great and stable in a fresh and propper environment. but those crapware installations are terrible.

 

Well, on the question I asked, I'll take that as a long-winded way of saying "no."

The point about the bloat-ware subsidy is probably precisely on point, and coupled with the fact that most typical users do not seem to care/mind the bloatware is, in effect, an answer - it's a cost-effective way to get consumers what they want at the lowest out-of-pocket cost possible.

You and I may intensely dislike the stuff, but as even your own anecdote demonstrates, a typical user is unlikely to really care, and probably sees it as the equivalent of having advertisements in her/his favorite magazine - something you just have to flip past to get to the rest of the story you're interested in reading. If that is the case, then, in the aggregate, bloatware is serving an economically efficient end - getting a computer into the consumer user's hands at the lowest cash price possible, by shifting some of the cash expense into a non-cash expense, namely, having to put up with bloatware on the system.

 

I'm not sure it's that they don't care so much as they don't even know. Obviously people that hang out on forums such as this have some base level of knowledge regarding their systems (or they wouldn't be here) but it's almost astounding how little some civilian users know about their machines and OS. I support about 50 real estate agents who have their own equipment. I'll bet that fully half of them couldn't tell you what operating system they're using. Check that, I'll bet it's more like 75%. ("I think I have Windows Office...Lou Ann, we've got Windows Office, right?") I've seen 3 year old laptops with trialware/bloatware shortcuts still littering the desktop. It's not that they don't care, they just have no clue as to what anything on their system is and they're too afraid to touch anything. You could cripple half of these people by deleting a shortcut from their desktop. Start menu? Programs menu? What are those? Why is half of my brower window taken up by 16 different toolbars? I don't know, isn't it supposed to be like that?

But man it's terrible how some of these machines get shipped. I see a lot of HP's and they're almost unusable out of the box with all the garbage on there. Like I said, I keep my trap shut. The company pays me to support their business apps on those laptops, not to streamline some yahoo's personal OS install. Thank god.

 

Unfortunately, that's still the best overall value proposition precisely because the typical user doesn't care, and in fact cares so little that they aren't even willing to find out what that "junk" on the desktop is. The "best" solution generally isn't the most technically superior solution, but the one that provides the most aggregate perceived value. After all, .Windows itself isn't a tour-de-force, but it is the most widely-used workstation/desktop OS.

 

So I'm wondering, why not have a compromise? Don't have the bloatware installed on the system right away but just have at the welcome screen when the persons uses the system for the first time if they would like to install a certain program with a flashy description of what it does and what changes to expect on your system. If the user opts not to install it, let the user know if he ever wants to install these programs at a later date, just click on an icon on the desktop. Far less intrusive and gives the crapware companies to expose their products to the customer without them just despising it due to first 'slowdown' impressions.

 

Why go to the extra trouble and expense when you're unlikely to see a sufficiently offsetting increase in the bottom line?

 

I would think that the perception of your product after the large disapproval for the trials and annoying pop up windows would be enough.

That and the omnipresent Mac ads claiming that they are not like this, they just work.


I guess the loss in sales have not reached the point to consider any compromise just yet. I can only hope for these companies that it does not happen and they cannot react in time.

 

Well, I'm guessing that the suppliers of trialware wouldn't quite see it that way. Exposing eyes to a brief one-time glimpse of your "offer" at a point when most people just want to get booted up and get started is far different from having your product displayed on the desktop 24/7. Look at McAfee. How many people end up paying for McAfee (Or Norton, or whatever bloated security suite got put on there) because they ran it for a 3 month trial and now they just have to pay $50 to continue it? Would those people ever buy McAfee without having it shipped and pre-installed? Not bloody likely.

 

Your point about McAfee is certainly true in my case - when I bought the 6 y.o. VAIO I have, back before I knew diddly about computers, I went with McAfee because that's what was on the system. Of course, the flip-side of that is, I probably wouldn't have gotten any anti-virus software at all if McAfee hadn't been there because I wouldn't have known that I needed it (at least not until my system had gotten thoroughly infected, and I finally figured it out after trying to fix things ).

So, while the McAfee was bloatware in one sense, it also served a useful purpose because it got me something that provided some protection and that I would not have thought to have gotten myself.

 

We should write an even more extensive guide to bloatware and how it affects performance than the one featured on the main page. Many of the manufacturer forums have guides to their specific bloatware packages, and we could integrated that into an easy-to-read document for non-tech-savvy people.

Then we should popularize it.

 

Sounds great! You're nominated!

 

When this question first came up, I thought, "There's no way that the computer manufacturers will remove the bloatware. It's one of their key income streams. Besides, it doesn't bother me that much I always clean install my OS on new machines."

But, the more that I thought about it, I think that this is a real opportunity for one of them to set themselves apart. If I were the CEO of one of the large PC makers, I would immediately discontinue all pre-installed bloatware and then increase the price of each machine $50 to $100 to compensate for the lost revenue.

Then I would focus all of my marketing on the message of fast, efficient, reliable, out of the box performance. This way I could differentiate my boxes from everyone else's. I could legitimately claim that my machines were faster and more reliable than all other PC's.

Imagine if Joe consumer walked into Best Buy and tried out a typical pre-configured laptop loaded with bloatware and then stepped up to my machine that has a clean, optimized OS. I am confident that there would be no comparison. Most customers wouldn't even know why my machine ran better. They would just see that it was faster and more responsive.

Right now, most consumers look only at a couple of numbers - processor speed, ram, and hdd capacity. It's the only method they have of comparing machines. This turns the whole PC market into a commodity market. And, they don't realistically see any difference from a Dell to an HP to a Sony. If you could get your customers to look beyond hardware configurations to reliability and performance then you could really start to differentiate yourself.

Apple has been successful at making the consumers' choice as one of Apple v All The Rest. And, in the consumer's mind All The Rest are effectively the same. If you take out the bloatware you would compete better with Apple and differentiate yourself from rest of the PC's.

 

You may just have found your own business niche. When can we start taking delivery!

 

I may be nuts, but I seem to recall a manufacturer (perhaps Dell?) briefly either trying this, or considering it. The idea was that the customer could opt for a "clean" Windows install sans bloatware, but it would cost about $50 more. Whether it was tried in practice, I can't recall.

I dunno what Best Buy you shop at, but at the ones in my area all the machine are usually competely hosed up, crashed, or crippled. I'm not sure anyone takes much away from the performance of those demo laptops.

If that. I get asked about laptops all the time, and I'm always shocked how little thought people give to even the most basic specs. For many, it's just $$$ and nothing else. It's this block of consumers that makes the bloatware invasion successful, and oddly they're also the ones most hurt by it since they're the least savvy and least likely to rectify it on their own.

 

I believe it was _Sony that was offering a bloat-free experience, for $40 extra - I also believe that they've since withdrawn the offer.

 

+1
yep. it was sony. i mentioned that on page 1 of this thread.

http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/03/21/Sony-charges-to-remove-laptop-bloatware_1.html

sure offering such a service is nice to a customer. but every buyer that is smart enough to find out how bananas are opened will soon think:

hey i pay you guys to uninstall the crap you guys have installed in the first place. sure enough a lot of people have told sony that such a service seems rather a ripoff.

bad marketing idea

 

I never thought the "bloat free" option made a lot of sense. Folks that are savvy enough to know what it means, won't pay for it because they can do a clean install on their own.

People that don't know what it means won't pay for it. Besides, I think a lot of consumers think, "Oh, cool! I'm getting a bunch of free software! Why would I pay more to get less?" What they don't know is how much it kills the performance of their machine.

Instead of just a bloatfree option, I think that it would have to be a company-wide commitment from marketing to sales to production and delivery, that focused on performance, reliability and out of box experience. Wow, maybe I should go to work for Apple!

But seriously, this is what Apple has done. And I don't see any reason that another manufacturer couldn't be successful with this model - even using a Windows OS!

 

Well, IMO since Microsoft is taking the big hit on the end of Software and the OS...in regards to how the system works out of the box (just look at the Anti-Vista feelings on the internet, and ask any normal person about it...You'll get your answer right there), Microsoft should come up with a better long term solution to bloatware. I mean, it's the OEM's problem since its on THEIR computers and Microsoft doesn't have control over that. So they could either open up their own PC shop (Which is exactly what Apple did to control everything), or influence the way OEMs install XP/Vista/Windows 7. Maybe if they were willing to invest long term wise in good PR (especially for Windows 7), they could pay to get OEMs to install less or no bloatware at all in the first place. However, I'm not sure how much this would cost at all...like someone said earlier, OEMs can sell the PCs for so cheap for a reason.

And, even better yet, Microsoft could deliver "tweaked" OS install cds for OEMs to install...essentially optimizing the software on the hardware which would work wonders.

 

Apple of course has the luxury of controlling both the hardware and the software, so it can create whatever out of the box experience it wants, without regard to having to compete with other vendors. I mean, I haven't priced a MacBook or MacBook Pro recently, but I'm guessing that similarly spec'd hardware carries a $300 - $500 premium over a Windows-based notebook. But there's no competition. You want to run OSx, you buy an Apple.

The competition is much more cut-throat on the PC side. I think these vendors are literally battling over dollars per machine. I'd like to think that there is a big chunk of the market willing to pony up extra cash for a better experience, but something tells me that they're mostly not. As you noted about the bloatware-free machines, the savvy don't need it, and the un-savvy don't recognize why it'd matter.

 

I know Im quoting myself here, but Im sticking to my guns.

 

I don't care how much crap they install! It takes me less than an hour to put a disk in and do a clean install. I don't make $100 an hour, so its a good deal for me!

 

True. But many consumers buy OSx because that is what comes on an Apple. And they perceive that OSx is better is because it never comes bloated.

I agree. And if I were MS, I would find an OEM that was willing to partner with me to accomplish this.

One of the problems for the major OEM's (and all publicly traded companies over the past many years) is the pressure to make numbers on a quarterly basis. This encourages short-term profit generation over sustainable growth. Apple has been somewhat insulated from this as the Ipod (and to a lesser degree the Iphone) have buoyed along their computer business. It will be interesting to see what happens from a business point of view over the next several months.