Diebold

Diebold is one of the leading vendors of ATMs worldwide, and is now in the news:

http://www.diebold.com/

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/h?s=dbd

Whatever the outcome of the current boardroom hassle, it is obvious that things had gone wrong and that the future management of Diebold, whoever they be, will have to reassess the company and its ways.

From a qualitative point of view, I would like to make some observations:

The company admitted to accounting errors, though it isn't at all clear whether they are significant.

The voting machines affair shows two things: First, the internal technologists are not up to it, and second, the management did not make adequate use of external experts to verify the claims made by its internal team and the critiques of academic observers.

The support structure for software problems is worse now than it in the 1990's. It has been going down ever since the InterBold deal with IBM. It seems that Diebold has adopted all the bad habits of IBM in this area.

The ATMs are good machines. The hardware is good. The software is too complicated to use and it uses an operating system that is not suitable for high security applications.