Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 295 posts

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#91

Post by vacri »

Swizec wrote: post #70
zoeysaurusrex wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

"Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM"

Maybe, but then again you can't buy IBM if you're forbidden from buying it in the first place.

https://www.itnews.com.au/news/queenslands-ibm-ban-lives-on-...

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#92

Post by bhousel »

abtinf wrote: post #52
ingenuous2 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think before you ask for help from a community like this, you should either offer a reasonable promise that you can deliver better results, or offer to pay people for their time. IBM's Watson, for me, has been so much marketing fluff that it's in the Oracle class of "only bought by people who don't know better". A profitable business line, but not a problem solving business line.

I can make a reasonable promise that any feedback I get will be put in front of the right people.

For starters, stop airing commercials on TV that show Watson whispering to the capacitors in a jet airliner, or the grapes in a vineyard.

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#93

Post by pgodzin »

shostack wrote: post #90
pgodzin wrote: post #31

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,…

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?

For me, Watson Health is actually working on a lot of interesting work in the healthcare space that will eventually lead to improvement in care and outcomes. And hospitals are exactly the kind of clients that IBM handles well - complicated data requirements, government regulations, etc. It's a very difficult, and often frustrating, space to get into.

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#94

Post by vacri »

filereaper wrote: post #62
xienze wrote: post #25

> 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?

When you charge $60M to provide a solution, saying "Hey, it failed because we're not domain experts" is not a suitable response.

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#95

Post by visarga »

ballenf wrote: post #77
save_ferris wrote: post #12

I don't think this isn't limited to IBM, my partner's PE firm recently hired a small consulting group touting a "revolutionary, AI-driven" real-estate analysis product that has zero AI whatsoever. It's basically a custom spreadsheet tool that they're claiming to be building AI on top of as they consume company data, but for a few hundred grand per year, they have a basic CRUD app on Azure with a reporting tool using…

Later this year I predict they'll relaunch the product as being built on the blockchain. Problem solved.

"Deep Learning Blockchain"

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#96

Post by R_haterade »

ballenf wrote: post #77
save_ferris wrote: post #12

I don't think this isn't limited to IBM, my partner's PE firm recently hired a small consulting group touting a "revolutionary, AI-driven" real-estate analysis product that has zero AI whatsoever. It's basically a custom spreadsheet tool that they're claiming to be building AI on top of as they consume company data, but for a few hundred grand per year, they have a basic CRUD app on Azure with a reporting tool using…

Later this year I predict they'll relaunch the product as being built on the blockchain. Problem solved.

Also, containerization.

Oh wait, that was 2016, too.

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#97

Post by maxxxxx »

R_haterade wrote: post #89
maxxxxx wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lik…

Funny, you say that. Today I got feedback from someone that my bullshitting skills are not up to snuff and that I still have the naive idea that actual results count in the end :-)

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#98

Post by nulagrithom »

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

Not sure what part of IBM you're in, but I can speak as someone in an i Series shop.

The problem isn't the message. Everyone already drank the kool-aid. A lot of the problem is just the shoddy product, but really it boils down to the culture.

Put out comprehensive documentation _on the indexable Internet_ and not in PDFs, because for christsake if I have to open another Red Book PDF I think I might kill myself.

Make things that are open source -- and I don't mean Open Source™. Let me learn the platform. Let me hack away at an i Series or whatever on my own time.

Everything is so buried behind licensing and paywalls and PDFs and just general bullshit that I can _never_ invest in _anything_ IBM on a personal level. The vendor lock-in is so heavy that I resist even wasting time learning IBM products because in the back of my mind I'm always thinking "I'll never be able to take this with me to a new job."

The garden walls are too high.

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#99

Post by tjpnz »

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

Better messaging? Clearly you guys are not getting it.

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#100

Post by anjc »

matt4077 wrote: post #44
abtinf wrote: post #27

Earlier 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…

Ok Watson
Post reply on HN