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

141–150 of 295 posts

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#141

Post by hrktb »

deepGem wrote: post #113
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,…

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.

Traditionnaly at that scale, the people buying the product and the ones ending up using it are completely insulated by layers of bureaucracy. As long as the product can somewhat work, there won't be much repercussions for making shitty choices: the feedback won't go up enough or be ignored (as it is inconvenient)

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#142

Post by worldsayshi »

deepGem wrote: post #113
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,…

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.

IBM are not alone in getting away with this. Buyers of big brand products need to shape up and talk with their engineers. It's a farce.

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#143

Post by peterburkimsher »

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,…

"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"

If you give a summer intern your data and communicate what you want, they can also give you a custom solution at a fraction of the price. IBM's model might be more advanced, but the real challenge is applying the conclusions, rather than just building a model.

Communicating what you want is the hardest part. Most managers who are excited about AI (including my boss) have no idea what they want to use it for. "Making things more efficient" or "analysing what's going on in the factory" is way too vague.

Getting data is not so hard, but getting good metadata is a challenge. For example, downloading some music in Chinese and tagging the artist/play count/lyrics/etc. When I have all that metadata, I might not need the machine learning part - I can just find the top 1000 songs and process them manually in an afternoon.

Before spending millions on Watson, I think companies would have a higher return on investment by hiring a summer intern to come up with ideas for further research, and gather the data. Then they can apply AI if they really need it.

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#144

Post by sumoboy »

IBM should ask Watson how to fix the company first, then it would have some credibility. They don't treat there employees very well either, but neither does Oracle so why would anybody waste time working for losers.

+1 "dog shit wrapped in cat shit" .. that is awesome.

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#145

Post by pgodzin »

comstock wrote: post #136
pgodzin wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly what we do with all our pilot clients before we go into production. I'm not sure that IBM publishes these results after the pilot is done though.

Then it's understandable that people would be suspicious of a puff piece on 60minutes which provides no substantive information.

The people who care about the exact numbers and the audience for the 60 minutes piece are very different groups

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#146

Post by Teever »

sumedh wrote: post #116
deepGem wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I mean how can a company build shitty products like this and be a world leader in services Wasn't there a saying that no one got fired for buying IBM.

Yeah, in like 1975.

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#147

Post by emmelaich »

zoeysaurusrex wrote: post #61
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…

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,…

Yeah, IBM (and Oracle, and SAP and ...) have always been like this.

My own anecdote -- we had a need for a GIS/charting/mapping system. IBM responded to the RFP as did many others.

IBM proposed an entire office automation system with a minor charting system hanging off the side somewhere. Most of the components were unfamiliar to everyone. Though maybe there was Wordperfect or Lotus Notes in there. I remember meetings with IBM always had whole bunch of shiny suits whereas more focussed proposals just had one or two people visit.

After one or two rounds of pointless meetings our fairly technical director told them to go fuck off and never come back.

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#148

Post by bitmapbrother »

This is simply the media and analysts catching up with what everyone familiar with Watson already knew - that it was nothing more than marketing bullshit designed to project IBM as a leader in A.I. Watson is a lot like IBM's cloud initiative - a service so bad that they don't even use it internally, but have no problems conning their customers on its value.

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#149

Post by ohquu »

R_haterade wrote: post #131
heracles wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May I ask whom the competitor was/is? We are closing on the IBM bandwagon, but I want to show that there is alternatives.

It could out me. I'd like to hang on to my job, and we're not allowed to be critical of IBM.

It's IBM, isn't it?

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#150

Post by adrianN »

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

How about you save the money for the developer advocacy division and invest it into producing software that people do not hate? Literally every piece of IBM software I had to use was utter crap.
Post reply on HN