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Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

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Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#31

Post by pgodzin »

The marketing has made it very hard to have a real conversation about IBM Watson. There is no such singular thing as "Watson". IBM offers a ML solution for health, for NLP, chatbots, etc. They all have very different capabilities and require different levels of machine learning. The marketing is BS, but most of the tech is real - if you give IBM your data, let them train a model on it, and communicate what you want, you will get an end-to-end custom solution. It's just not the magic IBM sells in its marketing videos.

Disclaimer: SWE at Watson Health

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#32

Post by ben_jones »

throwaway9980 wrote: post #3

IBM vastly over promises with their marketing. It is so frustrating to have to answer questions from the CEO about why we don't solve all our problems with magic beans from IBM's Watson. I understand that this is what they want. They want to drive executives' interest in the product, but I believe they do so at the expense of their goodwill with the tech community. Am I the only one who cringes when these ads air? Ed…

It didn't bug me until 60 minutes did a full blown 15 minute commercial for IBM on how Watson is saving the world. No I will not leave a link to that absurd piece.

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#33

Post by jclulow »

abtinf wrote: post #21
perseusprime11 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real problem is that Everybody is afraid to share data with them because they know Watson will become better at the expense of company's business model.

Disclosure: I work in developer advocacy at IBM. The issue of data privacy and protection is complex. IBM provides explanations and opt-outs in many of the Watson services. For example, you can set the X-Watson-Learning-Opt-Out header on speech-to-text calls to prevent retention and use of your data for learning. [1] [1] https://www.ibm.com/watson/developercloud/doc/speech-to-text...

Why not an X-Watson-Retention-Opt-In header?

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#34

Post by boyce »

abtinf wrote: post #27
throwaway9980 wrote: post #3

IBM vastly over promises with their marketing. It is so frustrating to have to answer questions from the CEO about why we don't solve all our problems with magic beans from IBM's Watson. I understand that this is what they want. They want to drive executives' interest in the product, but I believe they do so at the expense of their goodwill with the tech community. Am I the only one who cringes when these ads air? Ed…

Disclosure: I work in developer advocacy at IBM. Thank you for sharing your view. If you'd like to talk more about how we can better message our offerings, please feel free to reach out. I'd love to learn more about the kinds of problems you are trying to solve. Edit: yes, I know, this is a bland response to the parent. But change needs feedback. Edit 2: thanks matt4077

Surely a parody

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#35

Post by valarauca1 »

abtinf wrote: post #27
throwaway9980 wrote: post #3

IBM vastly over promises with their marketing. It is so frustrating to have to answer questions from the CEO about why we don't solve all our problems with magic beans from IBM's Watson. I understand that this is what they want. They want to drive executives' interest in the product, but I believe they do so at the expense of their goodwill with the tech community. Am I the only one who cringes when these ads air? Ed…

Disclosure: I work in developer advocacy at IBM. Thank you for sharing your view. If you'd like to talk more about how we can better message our offerings, please feel free to reach out. I'd love to learn more about the kinds of problems you are trying to solve. Edit: yes, I know, this is a bland response to the parent. But change needs feedback. Edit 2: thanks matt4077

I hate to say it but this comment is a lot of problem. It reads like it was generated from Watson, then approved by HR and Legal with minor edits.

I don't want to say that's your fault. I get it, I have a job too.

---

Honestly I wonder what IBM does these days.

Watson is a professional service Machine Learning thing, which can't be profitable. Onsite engineers enguaging one customer rarely is.

Power8/9 has flopped. Nvidia only appears to be on board to kick sand in Intel's eyes.

Then there's... Mainframes?

I know IBM has a cloud now, but honestly it's prices are far high then AWS or Azure.

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#36

Post by atsaloli »

This reminds me of a Linux Journal piece I did 5 years ago on system administration of the Watson supercomputer (after they got their 15 minutes of fame on Jeopardy):

http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/system-administration-ib...

They brought in a sysadmin after they got up to 800 OS instances. Before that, it was just 3 part-time researchers handling the system administration duties.

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#37

Post by phs318u »

abtinf wrote: post #27
throwaway9980 wrote: post #3

IBM vastly over promises with their marketing. It is so frustrating to have to answer questions from the CEO about why we don't solve all our problems with magic beans from IBM's Watson. I understand that this is what they want. They want to drive executives' interest in the product, but I believe they do so at the expense of their goodwill with the tech community. Am I the only one who cringes when these ads air? Ed…

Disclosure: I work in developer advocacy at IBM. Thank you for sharing your view. If you'd like to talk more about how we can better message our offerings, please feel free to reach out. I'd love to learn more about the kinds of problems you are trying to solve. Edit: yes, I know, this is a bland response to the parent. But change needs feedback. Edit 2: thanks matt4077

What makes you think I am trying to solve?

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#38

Post by pgodzin »

ben_jones wrote: post #32
throwaway9980 wrote: post #3

IBM vastly over promises with their marketing. It is so frustrating to have to answer questions from the CEO about why we don't solve all our problems with magic beans from IBM's Watson. I understand that this is what they want. They want to drive executives' interest in the product, but I believe they do so at the expense of their goodwill with the tech community. Am I the only one who cringes when these ads air? Ed…

It didn't bug me until 60 minutes did a full blown 15 minute commercial for IBM on how Watson is saving the world. No I will not leave a link to that absurd piece.

I'm a SWE at Watson Health. What do you think was so absurd about it? It definitely didn't explain the constraints and limitations well enough (it won't diagnose any problem you can have), but for the cancer scenario the segment centered on, the Watson solution is indeed able to greatly assist doctors with a task that does not scale well for them.

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#39

Post by dmritard96 »

somewhat off topic but I find their use of 'Watson' to be rather outrageous as he was a big part of IBMs Jew tracking systems installed in concentration camps during world war two. I suppose I already looked at IBM as an org that really does not own this as they should but its particularly bothersome that they would use his name as a flagship of their marketing efforts.
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