Can Watson save IBM?
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Can Watson save IBM?
1–10 of 32 posts
Re: Can Watson save IBM?
#2The issue for me is does IBM need to be saved? Their business practices have continued to be patent laden and closed. If they went down the road in a more open nature I feel that they wouldn't be in the place they are.
Re: Can Watson save IBM?
#3IBM is not a technology company - it is a technology holding company.
Watson has been around for a fair number of years; almost five years since the Jeopardy stunt. Aside from the story about Watson turning into a foul-mouthed asshole after being exposed to Urban Dictionary, I've not seen much that is particularly impressive out of it.
Re: Can Watson save IBM?
#4Why don't they just have watson play a few more rounds of jeopardy and use the winnings to support the company.
Re: Can Watson save IBM?
#5I've asked many IBM employees to explain to me what Watson actually does (like for real, not the marketing BS that's on TV) that would make me want to buy it. Nobody could explain it. Literally some where just like "yeah, I think they're still trying to figure out how they can make a product out of it."
The Jeopardy thing was cool but since then it's turned into this mystery black box that will supposedly solve all your problems, but nobody's can seem to point to any real successes that would matter to a business. Honestly it seems mostly like marketing fluff built on some midly proprietary distributed computing technology.
Re: Can Watson save IBM?
#6The issue for me is does IBM need to be saved? Their business practices have continued to be patent laden and closed. If they went down the road in a more open nature I feel that they wouldn't be in the place they are.
The last 15 years of IBM has basically been open.
1) They're in the top 5 re: Linux contributors. (Guess who else is in there? Microsoft.)
2) They dropped their JVM (J9) for OpenJDK - again upstreaming their patches to the community.
3) Eclipse was founded by them in 2001 (later released into the public domain).
4) They released (at least part of) their ML system "SystemML" into the public domain as well, during the same month MS opened theirs and Google opened TensorFlow.
They aren't patent trolls in the sense of those Texas LLP's who lease a few hundred square feet and fire off scare-letters. They hold a lot of patents because they are one of the few companies that actually funds pure research. They make a ton of money by bilking banks/the feds/states who still run their RMV on AIX @ 2mill a year in support contracts, etc, who are vendor-locked in. A not insignificant amount of money goes to:
5) Post-docs from really smart uni's to publish theoretical comp sci work in more journals than you'd imagine, which guess what? is also public domain!
They're really not hurting the consumer at all. In fact, I honestly don't see how they could be MORE open.
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[1] (And guess Who's not upstream'ing much at all but making billions off community written software? I'll give you a hint, its not Barnes & Noble! Even VMware donated back to FreeBSD. Support HN users who actually pay-it-forward[2] and use Tarsnap[3] instead of S3.)
[2] https://www.freebsdnews.com/2015/02/25/donate-freebsd-founda...
[3] www.tarsnap.com . Not affiliated with Colin but he's been a long-time HNer who isn't a conglomerate, taking GPL/BSD software, slapping a pretty coat of paint on it and selling it for huge margins. Pay a few cents extra and support startups. Karma, guys.
Re: Can Watson save IBM?
#7I feel Watson is very heavily marketing heavy. I've tried their APIs and their technology is very limited in functionality and accuracy. I have seen too many videos around "cognitive abilities" but their application at the moment from trial runs seems to be extremely crude.
Re: Can Watson save IBM?
#8Watson of course is PR-ware, a sort of flux capacitor for selling seven figure consulting services.
IBM does truly deserve credit for making Linux a safe choice for corporate IT. Few people remember this, but believe me I sat in on IT focus groups in 2001-ish.
Every. Single. Person. In every single session in every city said "there's no way we could use it in production". In every group, there was one who added "... but if IBM..." (literally as a sentence fragment like that), then the whole room would agree out loud.
Spooky. And then IBM came out with a big Linux campaign and the rest is history. Anyway, that happened.
It doesn't make a business for IBM. But it was a good contribution. That too was a way for IBM to sell consulting services. Which is all they really are.
Re: Can Watson save IBM?
#9Watson of course is PR-ware, a sort of flux capacitor for selling seven figure consulting services. IBM does truly deserve credit for making Linux a safe choice for corporate IT. Few people remember this, but believe me I sat in on IT focus groups in 2001-ish. Every. Single. Person. In every single session in every city said "there's no way we could use it in production". In every group, there was one who added "...…
Thank you for this reminder, we owe IBM a lot for their early Linux efforts.
I was pushing Linux into production, hard, for a very large company in the late 90s, with only limited success. It wasn't until 2001, because of IBM, when the nearly fanatical resistance to Linux started to fade.
Re: Can Watson save IBM?
#10I've asked many IBM employees to explain to me what Watson actually does (like for real, not the marketing BS that's on TV) that would make me want to buy it. Nobody could explain it. Literally some where just like "yeah, I think they're still trying to figure out how they can make a product out of it." The Jeopardy thing was cool but since then it's turned into this mystery black box that will supposedly solve all y…
I don't know that this is "something that would matter to a business" per se, but here's something else they're working on with it: https://www.ibmchefwatson.com/community