This is only the beginning of selling AI as a panacea. People, if it does something useful, there is a term for it. The only reason not to use that term is to AVOID direct comparisons.
Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check
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Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check
#82IBM 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…
I'm happy to be harsh because I've had years and years of experience dealing with IBM. Their tools are trash for the cost they want. The majority of their offerings are overengineered and prone to failure in a production setting. They are pros at selling to non-technical management, all the while IT employees get stuck dealing with the aftermath. We ended up getting stuck with the IBM version of work item management,…
This sounds no different than my experience with some Oracle and SAP products that we had the unfortunate pleasure of supporting.
Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check
#83[deleted]
Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check
#84IBM 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…
I recently sat through a sales pitch for a piece of IBM software that has an intensely focused (and better) competitor.
IBM's sales pitch was that 1) this particular piece of software was "central to IBM's [market niche] strategy", and 2) if we didn't go with IBM's product, we would miss out on all the interoperability with IBM's Watson that the future is going to bring. The tone veered toward fire-and-brimstone. I wasn't sold, I was put off. They've demoed other things in the past that I've had my socks knocked off by, but they're nothing that's the sort of "indistinguishable from magic" that they're promising in all the marketing hype.
The thing is, IBM delivers tremendous value, and they have some fantastic products. However, stunts like that leave people like me with a very sour taste in my mouth. If they'd just focus on delivering a better product, as quantified by hard metrics, (which they could easily afford to do), they'd keep making out like bandits for a very long time. There's tremendous good-will toward them in the market: bad experience aside, I'm still favorably disposed toward them.
Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check
#85somewhat 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.
I had always assumed that Watson was a reference to Sherlock Holmes' assistant. "Elementary my dear Watson" and such.
Googled "ww2 watson" to find the wiki with the info you reference.
Does IBM make clear which Watson the name's a reference to? I have to think you're right, but the Sherlock Holmes reference makes so much more sense to me in the sense of being the assistant while also stroking the customer's ego as the brilliant detective who hired Watson.
Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check
#86> Jefferies pulls from an audit of a partnership between IBM Watson and MD Anderson as a case study for IBM’s broader problems scaling Watson. MD Anderson cut its ties with IBM after wasting $60 million on a Watson project that was ultimately deemed, “not ready for human investigational or clinical use.” Well, can't say I'm surprised. I used to work on that project a few years ago, basically the idea was that Watson…
So if I understand correctly, there was dirty/malformed data which was difficult to interpret, and when sent to a ML algorithm not tuned by a domain expert led to bad results. This applies to all ML work, why is Watson exempt from it? Conversely if this the canonical failure case, why's everyone so harsh on Watson?
> Conversely if this the canonical failure case, why's everyone so harsh on Watson?
Because what is being promoted under the “Watson” brand is (or at least includes) examples of this failure case.
Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Here's some feedback: sentences like "getting feedback is essential toward driving change" are the reason nobody likes IBM. "Change", as used here, is a noun based on the verb "to change". If your sentence calls for a verb, you can just go back to the original "to change". Something isn't essential "toward" something else. It is essential "for" something else. "is essential" is unnecessarily passive. Use active verbs…
i like how you made it more succinct by changing it to "Change needs feedback" but your drawn out explanation makes you sound like a person who doesn't know how to provide feedback
Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check
#88Best story I heard from a guy who claimed to have worked at IBM in a bar was when he went to meet a client and they asked, in all seriousness, where the talking hologram from the commercial was.
Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check
#89IBM 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…
This certainly works with the IT department and top executives in my company. I have seen Watson mentioned in a ton of presentations and they are all super excited about it. In the last 12 months I have been trying to find out about anything concrete they are doing but so far nothing. It seems all talk.
Lol. You don't understand. It's a fantastic way to seem like you're doing something innovative when you're not really doing anything at all.
The good ones use it as a smoke screen to cover for doing things that need to be done but that the C-level isn't necessarily going to like, the bad ones use it as a cover for incompetence.
The fact that you're more concerned about the truth is why you'll never be on the take like them. :-)
Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check
#90The 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,…
How do they market it to a tech audience who presumably see through this sort of thing due to a technical understanding of the subject matter?