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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

#211
post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

c'mon they aren't the IT's crown jewel but you're doing a disservice to them. while products have accrued years of shit, as every old product does, it is extremely frustrating for very large enterprises and governments to talk with system integrators or even startup - most often than not their product is totally not ready to cope with the audit requirements, security requirements, they often don't even have a clue of what enterprises need on that front neither how to handle all the red tape around security certifications, legal requirements, disclosures requests that those clients usually have.

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#213

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,…

Hey Willie I'm feeling some negative customer feedback here.

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#215
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?

> why's everyone so harsh on Watson?

well we're talking a _cognitive_ platform that requires 60M$ of _manual_ tuning before it's useful, am I the only one that finds that weird?

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oracle's Responsys is definetly dog shit wrapped in cat shit. I hope you'll never had to deal with that dumpster fire.

Even just trying to install Oracle 11g correctly was hard. I think it expected to be installed in /usr/local and company procedures demanded that it was installed in /opt (or the other way around). For this it would consequently misplace some permissions on some of the files causing a later stage in the installer to fail and bork the installation.

Hilariously Oracle database can't run on Oracle Linux OOTB...

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#217
post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is actually a cycle. Managers in an enterprise are judged based on their ability to deliver low cost solutions ie "savings". IBM(or any service business) is very good at selling these low cost solutions to managers. We are starting a project and even with FTE's within the company, "consultant" has convinced management to hire IBM resources because of cost. The high sounding reason within the presentation twisted i…

So OK , you can do this cycle for some time, for a few people. But doesn't the word get around ? does nobody in most enterprizes think long-term when investing ?

No one at this level thinks further than their next annual bonus. If the wheels come off after who cares, they've moved on to do the same thing to the next company...

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#218
post #27

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

I've provided this feedback to others at IBM with no apparent change, so let's see how this goes with you. First off, I work for a Fortune 200 firm who's executives are intrigued by the capabilities Watson can provide for our business. We've had three different Watson engagements for three different business units and three different usage scenarios - none of them came to fruition. The problem is IBM is unable to deliver a Watson project template. Project managers live by the 80/50 rule - when 50% of the project's funds are spent you'd better be 80% complete with your project's features. How do you know where you are with regards to the completion of a Watson project? How do you know you're on the right track? How do you know when to scrap what you have and start over?

IBM sends out a team for each of the engagements to work with the business unit leaders to educate them on the capabilities of Watson and how to train Watson. It was all pie-in-the-sky stuff. Since we're an engineering-oriented company our business executives tend to have a strong engineering background (we tend to promote from within) and the whole thing smelled fishy to them, sounded too good to be true. When they asked us IT guys about it we presented the problems mentioned in the first paragraph. They concurred.

So we've never taken the bait. That's the problem you're having with Watson.

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oracle's Responsys is definetly dog shit wrapped in cat shit. I hope you'll never had to deal with that dumpster fire.

Even just trying to install Oracle 11g correctly was hard. I think it expected to be installed in /usr/local and company procedures demanded that it was installed in /opt (or the other way around). For this it would consequently misplace some permissions on some of the files causing a later stage in the installer to fail and bork the installation.

See it wasn't that hard. Stupid company procedures made it hard-er and even then iff you know what you are doing it is still trivially easy. It is so easy even sysadmins can do it. Next next finish have a cookie back in your gimp cave now easy.

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#220

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…

> 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.

could be worse, could be magic beans from IBM Blockchain.

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