Farhad Manjoo over at Salon’s Machinist blog says it all so well, I’m just going to let him explain the brilliant new marketing move over at ever-reputable Diebold. The Wikipedia bit sounds oh-so-familiar. Snip:
“Diebold Election Systems” are three words synonymous with the aggressive pursuit of failure. Not only did the company badly implement a dubious concept — unverifiable electronic touch-screen voting machines — but it did so with determined flourish, letting its code and internal communication leak out onto the Web; employing as a chief executive a man who declared he was “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year”; abusing copyright law in an attempt to quell its critics; and, among many other caught-red-handed indiscretions, deleting criticism of itself from Wikipedia.
No wonder, then, that Diebold Election Systems has decided to steal a page from the playbook of that paragon of corporate responsibility Philip Morris (aka the Altria Group): Diebold will erase its sorry history with a simple name change!
Henceforth, when reaching for an example of mind-boggling incompetence, please say “Premier” rather than “Diebold,” because Diebold Election Systems is now Premier Election Systems.
The name change, the company says in a press release, “signals a new beginning” and a “fresh identity” — though in the same release the firm concedes that it will still be making and pushing the same sorry voting machines (machines that, as Princeton computer scientist Edward Felten and his colleagues showed last year, are actually vulnerable to a virus-based attack).
Why the name change? Well, Diebold’s got a lot of other businesses — it makes ATMs and security systems for health firms and for the government, and the election subsidiary has always been something of a sideline. (…)
Link (go read the rest!).