I seriously doubt it.
Regarding New Coke, that formula was genuinely favored over both the classic
Coke and Pepsi formulas in blind taste-tests, and people to this day enjoy
the base of it (Diet Coke; New Coke just took this formula and changed
aspartame to sugar). The only reason people were outraged over New Coke was
because of a century of propaganda that made people feel strangely connected
to Coca-Cola. You would have to believe that the Coca-Cola company is
omniscient to be able to pull off a scheme to make this happen on purpose; no
rational person would ever expect people to be outraged that you replaced a
formula which is declining in popularity because it fails taste-tests, with a
formula that wins all taste-tests. Snopes has a nice article about this:
http://www.snopes.com/cokelore/newcoke.asp
And this case with Unity? I don't think it's really comparable; Canonical
didn't replace something with something else and then switch back, they added
a feature and then later disabled it by default due to privacy complaints.
What's more, Unity was already a thing that replaced something people were
familiar with. But realistically, unless your omniscient, how could you
possibly predict as a rational actor that adding in an anti-feature and then
removing it later would result in a net increase in users? We don't even know
that this is going to happen.
The thing is, this stunt could easily have cost them recommendations for
Ubuntu, as well as users of Ubuntu. But why would you presume that ending it
is going to cause more people to want to use or recommend Ubuntu after the
fact? You also have to consider the time frame; this controversy started
three years ago, and they are only changing the default settings 5 releases
later. Even if you really thought that causing a controversy where you
disrespect users' privacy and then fix the problem would cause people to
start clamoring in support of you for some reason, if you were going to go
this route, surely you would fix the problem immediately? As in, at least by
the time Ubuntu 13.04 rolled out?
Furthermore, the post the OMG! Ubuntu! post referenced doesn't even mention
privacy as a factor. The reason Will Cooke says they are turning it off by
default is to ease transition from Unity 7 into Unity 8; basically, so that
they don't have to worry as much about breaking Unity 7's online search
feature during Ubuntu 16.04's support period.
