One of the things that bugs me when browsing the Internet is when websites ask stupid questions. Let’s start out by defining what a stupid question is. A question is stupid if it is irrelevant to my immediate task or if you already have the answer to the question. Let’s look at an example:
IBM’s Leveno website asks a stupid question as soon as I enter their website: Select a country/region.
There is no need to stop people and ask them where they are from. They already have the answer to this question. Using a technology called geolocation which is able to map a visitor to a geographic location, they can make a smart guess and automatically direct someone to the right version of the website while giving them the option to change to a different language/location once in the site.
For WordPress users, there are plugins that simplify this such as the IP2Location plugin. It allows you to customize your content based on the location of your visitor.
It’s lazy web design to ask users to answer questions to which you already know the answer. Do the work to make the users experience on your website frictionless.
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What has IBM got to do with this? Your problem is with Lenovo not IBM. You may be confused because Lenovo bought the IBM Thinkpad brand.
Ultimately your point still stands, websites should make an educated guess on the customer’s location using IP-to-country look-up lists (some which are freely available). They should also allow the user to override the default country selection and remember the user’s preference.