LOL, one person's paranoia is another person's familiarity with marketing history.
Marketing can be an artful blend of making product changes appear to be driven by consumer demand and/or driven by research. The history of marketing is one of strategies to create a need, and then fulfill it. The process of creating a need can at times seem counter-intuitive or self-effacing.
When a commercial enterprise is driving the consumer demand and/or research which creates the need which is then readily fulfilled by the commercial enterprise, some may inquire as to the true chronological order of events... what came first... the chicken or the egg... the planned change or the consumer demand/research?
In this case, we see that
McGraw Hill, long thought of as a "textbook publisher" no longer self-identifies that way, but rather as MH Financial and MH Education, "
A leading provider of customized and adaptive digital learning solutions." whose
webpage contains recent press release and posting with titles such as "... Accelerate Digital Conversion (6/29/2015)" and "Dear Students and Faculty: Please Go Digital (8/20/2015)".
A healthy dose of skepticism is... healthy.
Tangently related, an example of this type of marketing may be the
undisclosed research which College Board claims has driven changes to the
SAT.
