[fjtorres]

From ZDNET, a possible "solution" to the crapware problem:

http://www.zdnet.com/article/is-it-t...tag=TRE17cfd61

Of note:

Fortunately, thanks to some reporting by Forbes staffer Thomas Fox-Brewster, we know the depressing answer to one of those questions:

According to sources with knowledge of the deal, Lenovo certainly made less than $500,000 from Superfish. Forbes believes the deal was only worth between $200,000 and $250,000, a paltry sum given the massive earnings at the Chinese giant and the potential legal and PR costs the company has and will incur throughout the Superfish aftermath...
Seriously, Lenovo customers, they sold you out for pocket change.

I am positive that Superfish made an order of magnitude more from this sleazy deal.

So maybe Microsoft can insist that its OEM partners stop polluting new PCs with unwanted software? Sorry, that's not going to happen.

For one thing, there's the painful memory of those awful antitrust actions. For years, Microsoft was forbidden from taking any action that would inhibit the freedom of its hardware partners to install third-party software:

The unintended consequence of allowing PC makers to substitute and support any software they want? Middleware became crapware. Desktops were splattered with icons for unwanted software. Preloaded media players and toolbars and add-ons and trial editions slowed PCs to a crawl. Even today, some retail PCs are crammed with so much third-party software that they take forever to start up. Microsoft still can't legally do anything to make your overall Windows experience better when you buy a Windows PC sold by an OEM. All they can do is try to shame their OEM partners into doing the right thing.

The U.S. consent decree ended a few years ago, but its painful memories live on in Redmond. And there are much fresher memories of billion-dollar spankings from the EU. Any attempt to actually prevent OEMs from installing non-Microsoft software on a new PC would be an open invitation for a new round of antitrust hearings and a few more billions of dollars/Euros in fines.

So why not ask the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and its European counterparts to force PC makers to 'fess up and disclose every single penny, literally, that they received to pollute your PC? If the required disclosures included a list of 53 programs whose average utility is less than zero and for which the OEM collected a penny or so, would that perhaps be incentive for those OEMs to turn down some of those deals?

More at the source.