Why is it objectively bad? Logos are pretty subjective things.
Subjectively- color pallets is awful. Font choice is poor.
In my view Paul Rand was never a "great" designer, just a prolific one.
All I had to do to invalidate that design was to think of the place it will most often be used.
BS, it looked just fine:
http://www.osdata.com/system/ui/screens/next.jpg
And in fact he printed it in various scales (large to tiny), in both color and black and white, to show how it still looked identifiable and good (not shown properly in TFA, you can find the design studies with the various sizes on the web easily, its part of the same document).
I was willing to entertain the (far-fetched) notion that you actually know what you're talking about, up until that line.