111–120 of 295 posts
I am genuinely curious...
I have a comp sci degree and worked in different industries relating to software and have never even seen or touched any IBM tech except for those old cash registers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I think the 60 Minutes segment was just marketing copy handed to them by IBM (how else could they talk for 20 minutes about cutting-edge ML without mentioning Google or Amazon at all?). Watson is introduced as "an AI" - singular - designed to play Jeopardy and then, after he wins, nobly re-purposed to medicine. Charlie Rose even says at one point that "they taught Watson to diagnose cancer", implying that it was the…
I agree the language is problematic for non-technical viewers, but at the same time these are difficult concepts to explain to non-technical people, and explain the details of what it can't do is obviously much less compelling than focusing on what it can do.
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…
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,…
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
Talking about market strategy, no one knows what IBM does anymore other than garner support contracts and land body-shop jobs. Everyone knows Watson because it's won Jeopardy and a few other games. But that's not because Watson is ground-breaking or anything, but because IBM hasn't done anything else new in 5-10 years. So Watson seems less like a crowning achievement, and more like debris from the Titanic. The company's treading water, and barely, at that.
Sales, however, swears that Watson can do everything from getting the best tax return to curing hair-loss and replacing 80% of the work force. But anyone who's not a fool knows that current AI still has to be tailored towards an industry to be useful. And that's still going to take a huge amount T&M investment. Which you can see from the well-known failed (and expensive) Watson projects.
Usually the only companies who fall for it are the ones where management is less about technical skills and more about kickbacks and favor trading. Or national/international-level contracts where the most important thing required is someone to blame or sue when things inevitably go wrong. Everyone else either understands the technology is more complicated than the presentation, or they have enough insight into IBM to discount the powerpoints.
I mean, IBM still isn't as bad as Oracle. But, if I had to pick a metaphor for IBM's reputation... I'd go with "IBM is as much an innovator as Steven Seagal is an action star."
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,…
Anyways, any way for someone outside IBM to read about the health division effort and collaborations ?
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,…
What perplexes me is that none of these seem to affect their services business. 39 billion in services revenues is nothing to scoff at. I mean how can a company build shitty products like this and be a world leader in services ? Do these units operate like two separate entities.
Wasn't there a saying that no one got fired for buying IBM.
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…
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 w…
We are closing on the IBM bandwagon, but I want to show that there is alternatives.
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?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Kind of reminds me of these frustrating anti-nuclear advocates that set up a table with some posters at my old college one day. They couldn't give me any real answers why I should support solar wind and hydro over nuclear besides nuclear being "old technology". They had no response to the fact that this state isn't ideal for large scale use of any of the green alternatives or that much more deaths directly result fro…
It sounds like you trolled some kids passionate about a subject to argue for a technology and industry that you don't really understand. Were you prepared to compare the plight of the solar installers who fall off of roofs and get injured to the construction workers injured on the job during various nuclear plant construction projects? Did you count the various victims at Chernobyl? (Epidemiologists project at least…
The Banqiao dam killed 170k, and that's just the largest dam failure, there's a heavy tail following it. Wind and solar don't have any single incident so dramatic, but they require so damn much manufacturing, construction, and maintenance to generate so little energy that they don't do particularly well in the comparisons I've seen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents
Admittedly this is a surface level understanding, but you speak with the confidence of someone who knows better while providing even less concrete information. I'm hoping you've got deeper knowledge to back your position up and that you're willing to share.
> Were you ready to justify why states like New York needs to subsidize nuclear...
Everyone in the energy industry gets subsidies. Big subsidies. What matters are costs per kwh, and nuclear seems to win there too.
http://instituteforenergyresearch.org/analysis/electric-gene...
Are these numbers wrong? If they're wrong, and fission is actually much more expensive than it looks, is it because fission is fundamentally hard / risky or because the updated prices factor in risk due to irrational public perception?
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…
"Watson" made more sense to me when I realized it was just a branding term for any AI-related product, API, or service offered by IBM, which vary widely in functionality. That fact is not that hidden [1], but their marketing doesn't exactly emphasize it. If you view it that way, "Watson" should just be compared against any other similarly broad AI-as-a-service offering with strengths and weaknesses, not treated as so…