"the more confused you are about what you're purchasing, the more likely you are to pay more and get less."
"Don't ascribe to malfeasance that which can be otherwise explained by incompetence" - Napoleon.
Having worked in this area I would say it's simply a matter of zero product strategy, not some dark pattern. And I'm not sure I agree with the confusion bit though you could be right, I don't think so. Confusion is death to a sales funnel.
Here's a product, oh, let's make a variation, oh, another variation with this cool new thing our M&A team bought, oops, power regs mean in that other country we need this - so let's make another model. But Microsoft wants a specific hardware version for their OS, so 10 more version. Hey have you seen this new stylus (!?) Marketing says 10% of Millennial want them, let's tweak the screen and make 5 more models with that.
Basically, there's no product strategy.
The 'web site' is basically just taking orders from Product, and simply 'doing their job' by organizing it in some way ... which may include some douchy designers view on how it ought to be displayed.
Then Marketing Ops posts some vanity metrics and voila.
Someone with a lot of power has to go in there and change that, and otherwise, it won't happen.
If the culture is not there from the start, or from the top, it won't happen.
So I actually agree with you 100%... but in the sense that's it's working inadvertently.
I'm very familiar with internal politics/chaos resulting in an explosion of models... ;)
But the thing is: if this were hugely detrimental to the bottom line, it would get fixed. But it's not. To the contrary, it actually improves the bottom line, even if it wasn't designed to do so. So other things get fixed, but not this.
And if I'm shopping for a new <insert superfluous consumer item here> then sure, confusion is death to a sales funnel because I can just not buy. But if I need a new laptop and can't afford Apple, then I've got 3-5 brands to choose from and their websites/models are equally confusing...
...and so I probably wind up spending more money that I needed and the companies come out winners.
BUT... if another company comes along and goes after the value market with a simple-to-understand lineup, where the business model is massive, massive volume of a tiny number of models? And gains consumer trust? Kind of like Casper did with mattresses, another impossible-to-understand market? Or Warby Parker with glasses, where incumbents were waaay
overpriced? Well then there's a ton of money to be made, my friend. Indeed, I'm actually surprised it hasn't happened yet.
"if this were hugely detrimental to the bottom line, it would get fixed. "
The company I worked at didn't 'fix it' - they went out of business.
It would take an entire strategic overhaul to fix it - which is why these things keep happening.
I would take product line focus, brand communications, focused online retailing etc. etc.. That's hard to do most companies are incapable.
You'd be surprised at how inefficient so many operations are.
Who's going to put their hand up and say that it's broken? Or that they could fix it? Who's going to believe them? Does the company have the leadership and ability to even try an experiment? How would that work?
All of that takes thoughtful leadership across a few groups, which is sadly rare.
I think Amazon is a great example - there's so much clunkiness in their UI that I feel pretty confident some optimizations could be made. But it doesn't seem to compute in the way they roll their ops.
"It would take an entire strategic overhaul to fix it - which is why these things keep happening."
They could just ask for advice to whoever makes websites for semiconductor manufacturers and/or sellers: there's surely a lot of corporate blurbs in there but in a few clicks you also get to an easy to navigate matrix of products with filters to find exactly the needed part. It would become trivial for example to find a product with no less than x GB of RAM,SSD, that exact processor, x cells battery, xy sized screen, available in stock now etc. then sort the list by pricing.
The other not-that-nefarious explanation is that laptop brands with the exception of Apple tend to be not that great at merchandising their products. That's what retailers do really well. If selling direct to consumer is only a small fraction of overall sales, having a great consumer experience is strictly not a priority. If a lot of your sales come from corporate or academic IT departments, having a great catalog website for consumers is not a priority.
That's a great point. Banking UI's tend to be disastrous partly because banks think IT is for 'back office' - not part of the product. So it always mundane. Does the minimum.
It shouldn't be a shock that most of the people who buy something like Lenovo or current-day Dell are not individual consumers buying a single laptop. So the experience for individual consumers is not that great. Their best customers are IT departments ordering 200+ units at a time.
Go on Amazon, Newegg, B&H, eBay, or other higher quality computer retailers as an individual shopper and you will probably have a better experience buying any of the brands mentioned in the parent article. It might even be easier to buy direct from the manufacturer on eBay than it would be to use their own website and it's probably easier to get a Paypal refund than a refund through the manufacturer's own website.
One reason why Apple has had such incredible success in capturing market share is because they focused on creating a better direct to consumer experience. That is also why Dell had some great success when Apple stumbled in the late 1990s. They had an awesome eCommerce experience and great technical support.
"Don't ascribe to malfeasance that which can be otherwise explained by incompetence" - Napoleon.
Having worked in this area I would say it's simply a matter of zero product strategy, not some dark pattern. And I'm not sure I agree with the confusion bit though you could be right, I don't think so. Confusion is death to a sales funnel.
Here's a product, oh, let's make a variation, oh, another variation with this cool new thing our M&A team bought, oops, power regs mean in that other country we need this - so let's make another model. But Microsoft wants a specific hardware version for their OS, so 10 more version. Hey have you seen this new stylus (!?) Marketing says 10% of Millennial want them, let's tweak the screen and make 5 more models with that.
Basically, there's no product strategy.
The 'web site' is basically just taking orders from Product, and simply 'doing their job' by organizing it in some way ... which may include some douchy designers view on how it ought to be displayed.
Then Marketing Ops posts some vanity metrics and voila.
Someone with a lot of power has to go in there and change that, and otherwise, it won't happen.
If the culture is not there from the start, or from the top, it won't happen.