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

151–160 of 295 posts

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#151

Post by dragonwriter »

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.

> I mean how can a company build shitty products like this and be a world leader in services ?

IBM is optimized in enterprise (including government) sales. Product is not quite irrelevant, but it's a specialized enough market that often mediocre substantive quality does quite well, because the only competition that matters are the others that are optimized for that market.

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#152

Post by objclxt »

filereaper wrote: post #68
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,…

Hey man, you're not alone, even internal teams at IBM using Jazz Team Concert have been calling it "dog shit wrapped in cat shit" for years now. Don't be so harsh on all of IBM, its like hundreds of companies under one banner. Not all of them have the power to influence other products and often times end up stuck with it and cannot move on to other tools (i.e git). More often than not, customers have higher priority…

> Don't be so harsh on all of IBM, its like hundreds of companies under one banner.

I think you mean don't be so harsh on the people on the ground at IBM. If the issue is IBM's internal structure is fractured and disorganized then I think it's perfectly fair to blame the company.

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#153

Post by heracles »

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.

I'm upvoting you doing The Right Thing, but I'd like to downvote the reality instead:/

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#154

Post by bitmapbrother »

abtinf wrote: post #30
dpkonofa wrote: post #10

This and the comments below are really depressing to me. Watson seemed like such an exciting piece of tech and something that had the potential to change the world and now I feel like the shareholder's virus has stagnated it to the point of it being worthless. I've heard multiple stories where the staff that's assigned to demo and talk about Watson have no idea what they're talking about and that the marketing, manag…

Disclosure: I work in developer advocacy at IBM. If you are looking to build a project using cognitive technologies, you certainly should investigate your options. Each offering has different strengths with different workloads and small improvements in quality can go a long way. If you want to checkout the services for yourself without all the hype, take a look at the APIs on https://www.ibm.com/watson/developercloud…

If Watson had any intelligence whatsoever its first order of business would have been self preservation and to initiate the resource action of that incompetent CEO Ginni Rometty.

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#155

Post by [deleted] »

bitmapbrother wrote: post #148

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.

[deleted]

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#156

Post by LoSboccacc »

jacinabox wrote: post #120
_delirium wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

Anyone with a passing familiarity for Watson does view it that way.

Eh this is more of a recent development. Originally it was the natural language processing and knowledge extraction engine.

That is a hard sell because requires a truckload of configuration and internal expertise to get a working product out of it, and it ever only solves only some very narrow ranges of solutions.

In typical IBM style, since they can't have a multimillion research division going in red as that would get a bunch of management in trouble, they moved more and more product under the watson name to pad up the division growth and sales numbers.

That's the point where it is now after hoarding anything internal with value. You can see more or less the same with their cloud offer.

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#157

Post by gaius »

dragonwriter wrote: post #151
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 ? IBM is optimized in enterprise (including government) sales. Product is not quite irrelevant, but it's a specialized enough market that often mediocre substantive quality does quite well, because the only competition that matters are the others that are optimized for that market.

They sell products to people who will never personally use them. The executive signing cheques on the golf course has a PA to deal with its day to day use...

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#158

Post by sgift »

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.

They optimized for the thing which is currently important: Convince decision-makers that your product is the way to go - by any means necessary. This is as much a reflection on the tech peoples inability to actually influence companies buying decisions as it is on IBM. If companies started to value sound technology IBM (and Oracle and SAP ..) would shift its priorities.

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#159

Post by sgift »

Teever wrote: post #146
sumedh wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Or 2017. Things may change, but not as fast as some people hope.

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#160

Post by adrianN »

bischofs wrote: post #111

What does IBM even do anymore? Is it some bizarre set of buildings where they just play with computers and print money? What product do they sell? Whom do they sell it to? 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.

You need to work in crusty old companies that only recently got into doing software. Anything that produces hardware would be a good start.
Post reply on HN