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Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

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Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#161

Post by jancsika »

jimmaswell wrote: post #18
throwaway111991 wrote: post #2

I was at the CogX artificial intelligence summit in London a couple of weeks ago, and IBM were there in full force. I made several rounds around all of the stalls, and sat at the bar for a couple of hours with friends, and the whole time I could see the IBM stall, with 4-5 people there, WATSON plastered everywhere and nobody talking to them. So I went over. I got talking to one of their technical people there, I am h…

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…

> 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 from solar panel installation accidents alone than nuclear as a whole.

Given an uninformed student and a misinformed didact, I admit to having a strong bias toward criticizing the latter.

From the Wikipedia page on the human toll of the Chernobyl disaster[1]:

> The [2005 Chernobyl Forum report] says it is impossible to reliably predict the number of fatal cancers arising from the incident as small differences in assumptions can result in large differences in the estimated health costs.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Human_impac...

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#162

Post by cirgue »

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…

> "magic beans" is harsh

IBM sells an image, not a working product, and they deserve some ridicule for it.

I have worked with Watson and a decently large IBM consulting team, and 'magic beans' is a diplomatic way of putting it. 'Obfuscatory horse shit' is more accurate.

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#163

Post by sgift »

throwaway91111 wrote: post #76
Swizec wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM"

Please, let this quote be ironic.

It's a prevailing attitude in buying non-cheap ("enterprise") systems. If you buy one of the big names and it fails you can always say "they are a market leader, it was the best decision with the information we had available" - if you take a leap of faith for a not so well known name and the project fails it will probably cost you your job. People behave accordingly.

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#164

Post by taneq »

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,…

> The majority of their offerings are overengineered and prone to failure in a production setting.

What do you mean by 'over engineered' in this context? The usual way I've seen that term used would imply 'reliable but more expensive than necessary' rather than 'unreliable'.

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#165

Post by abtinf »

nulagrithom wrote: post #98
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

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…

Thanks for the comment. I'm not very familiar with the Power team, but I'll find the right folks and forward your note.

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#166

Post by rdiddly »

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…

Mostly good advice, except "Change needs feedback." No human talks like that. Change, as the subject of the sentence, "needs feedback?" What will happen when we take the feedback and give it to the change? What will the change do with the feedback? And what does the change need the feedback for?

Not all brevity is the soul of wit.

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#167

Post by chongli »

RRWagner wrote: post #105
tomjakubowski wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"IBM DAD"? :) More seriously, do you think Microsoft would have been more honest if they'd called Windows "Microsoft Graphical Multitasking Operating System"? Or if BMW had gone with "BMW Better Performance And A Cooler Badge But It'll Cost You" instead of "BMW M"? Brand names exist for a reason.

Why not just call it "Watson Systems"?

Because IBM markets to CEOs, not IT staff. They want their customers excitedly talking about Jeopardy-winning, superhuman AI at the dinner table. Technical people won't do that.

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#168

Post by LoSboccacc »

pgodzin wrote: post #38
ben_jones wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It didn't bug me until 60 minutes did a full blown 15 minute commercial for IBM on how Watson is saving the world. No I will not leave a link to that absurd piece.

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.

After how much supervised learning driven by highly paid experts? Watson would be more credible if papers/people citing it's efficacy would start showing the actual queries and answers of the system without being constantly mediated by IBM oracles sitting between renaponses and their interpretations

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#169

Post by lewisl9029 »

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,…

I remember hearing a lot of great things about Cloudant, which happens to be from IBM, on HN and elsewhere.

Is that just a notable exception or are there better alternatives out there these days for hosted CouchDB?

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#170

Post by RobLach »

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…

As I understand it IBM now pulls in a team of domain experts to help tune their algs and even markets this as an advantage over their competitors.

That makes the MD Anderson case more interesting as it mostly means that MD Anderson spent $60 million to help IBM figure out the importance of that.

It begins to seem obvious how IBM stays so impervious despite being so sluggish. If your marketing and sales teams can subsidize the engineering and design side so heavily by wooing the executives that actually sign the contracts, you can spin it as just "where the technology was at that time".

Selling on hype gets you in the door and establishes you as player, and eventually the tech will catch up. Being 1-2 years behind blurs when you're signing 5 year enterprise-scale deals that took a year to organize and negotiate.

And if your products really are a dead end, you've got enough of a war chest to just aquihire an entire branch of your company, like IBM did buying Softlayer to just become IBM Cloud Services.

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