Diebold: You've Got to Accentuate The Negative

from the shoulda-throught-that-one-through dept

Judging by all the bad press and controversy surrounding Diebold’s election services, you might think they’d want to play up that the company primarily makes ATM machines. In fact it seems just the opposite. The company recently promoted Thomas W. Swidarski former head of the elections division to be their new CEO, after the former’s abrupt resignation. So why of all people would they promote him? Not only was he at the head of their most controversial division, but he’s also considered to be inexperienced. The most optimistic answer is that he is very familiar with the problem they’re having (little things, like breaking election law), but since the problems arose under him, why do they think he’s the best one to solve them? This looks like a rushed decision, and one that will further tarnish the company’s reputation.


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Comments on “Diebold: You've Got to Accentuate The Negative”

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12 Comments
Thomas says:

Reputation?

I think the management of Diebold has made it pretty clear that they don’t give a rat’s ass about their repuataion. As long as they remain connected with the ruling party and are in a position to keep them in power, why bother with somthing as trivial as your companies reputation?
Even their ATM division doesn’t deal directly with consumers, who would drive most loss of business due to a bad reputation.

scavenger1 says:

Re: Reputation?

Diebold is a pretty sloppy, crooked company. They treat their employees like they own them, their management is only interested in passing the buck down to their techs because they do not want any responsibility and they LIE like Persian rugs. As a former employee, I can tell you they are the last people you would want handling any type of security. I left the company in ’04 for a better job and have not looked back!

Sarojin says:

Re: No Subject Given

But you DO have all the facts and are therefore qualified to discredit anyone being critical?

Do you have a relevant opinion or perspective on this which would make the discussion more interesting, or are you just whining about other people expressing ones that differ from yours?

You seem to entirely miss the point of this site.

As if a leaked appraisal would make it OK to be critical? How many links do you want about how faulty, unreliable, and unsecure these machines are? If he was in charge of that division, simple reason leads one to conclude that he’s either corrupt and made sure they were hackable, or he’s incompetent and couldn’t make them work.

Fitzwaller says:

Re: Re: the modern business model

Business being what its been the last several years, I think the consumer has every justification to be critical when some corporate entity’s behavior doesn’t quite add up. If more people had gone to the trouble sooner, all those people working for the companies Enron took over wouldn’t have lost their retirement programs, We’d see alot less consumer fraud as a result of lax or nonexistant oversight over consumer data, and I’m pretty sure the unemployment figures might be a tad lower as a result of fewer stupid corporate screwups. Now fricking let us criticize in peace!

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