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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

#261

Post by squeaky-clean »

bradley-holt wrote: post #252
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,…

I work for IBM as a Developer Advocate, though my opinions here are my own. One of my goals as a Developer Advocate is to represent the shift in buying power from "non-technical management" (as you described it) to individual developers and other technical staff. If those who have to use or have to integrate with the software are a part of the decision making process, then I believe that this will result in better qu…

This message has just as little substance as the other IBM employee's comment. Care to share any real examples of what

> However, I think you'll see this shift towards a developer-focused mindset happening more-and-more within IBM over the next few years.

means? In a discussion about not trusting IBM's marketing, you can't simply say "I hear you and it will get better, trust me."

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#262

Post by odammit »

staofbur wrote: post #196
reitanqild wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Back in about 1999, I was working for a big corporate and one of our Oracle admins lost her shit and had a meltdown, think it was around 8i era. She just got up and walked out shouting "fuck this fucking shit, I quit". This was on a freshly delivered HP N-Class HPUX box and they just couldn't get it to run after a month of going back and forth between HP and Oracle. I bumped into her last year at Ansible Fest London…

When I get issues were vendors point fingers at each other I three way call them, tell them what's up, hit mute, go get a coffee, and let them figure it out.

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#263

Post by hinkley »

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 GS also specializes in complexity. They sell their services to management, but then they come in and make the most complicated system they can sustain, which is too complicated for the full time staff to want to deal with.

As the staff back away slowly from the creep, that just makes more space for IBM, and they sell progressively more service hours. It's pretty much their MO.

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#264

Post by ionised »

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,…

My first dev job was with a civil engineering consultancy that also built a suite of tools for hydraulic modelling, geo-spatioal and logging and telemetry use cases. We used the IBM ILOG JViews framework for a lot of our software and honestly it was a pain to use and clunky as hell.

The worst thing though that was despite paying an inordinate amount of money to license this software each year and receive support for it they would not fix a bug we found in their mapping modules.

Specifically it was their use of float for X and Y coordinates in the IlvPoint object that you pretty much had to use to make a map work with their tech. In certain parts of the world there is an extra digit on the Y coordinate (projections) and the float they insisted on using couldn't store the whole value, meaning they would just round it up or down causing inconsistencies between our representation of a client's dataand the client's representation. That was an absolute no-go for us and the workarounds IBM suggested to us were absurd and bordering on insulting honestly.

We had a lot of trouble with our affected clients because of this and all we could tell them was that it was an IBM issue.

The absolutely refused to fix their product and eventually sold it to Rogue Wave, washing their hands of it. By that point though we had already decided on a few alternatives lest we start to lose customers (who were essentially massive utility companies from around the globe).

Fuck IBM.

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#265

Post by jimmaswell »

lightbyte wrote: post #259
0xbear wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why "trolled"? Those are all reasonable questions to ask. This advocacy has real world consequences.

It's "trolled" because the OP clearly did not actually understand what he was trying to argue for. He was just going for "gotcha" responses.

If someone is trying to spread awareness of global warming, and someone asks this person "but the climate has changed before, why is it different now", and all the climate change awareness advocate can say is "well, uh, climate change is bad, ok" then it still reflects poorly on the advocate for not being able to defend what they're advocating, not on the person who may have been misinformed but was giving the advocate a chance to show them the error of their ways.

And this isn't even accurate, everything I said is a common pro nuclear response. The only part I wasn't informed on at that moment was the budgeting issue.

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#266

Post by Spooky23 »

jimmaswell wrote: post #265
lightbyte wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's "trolled" because the OP clearly did not actually understand what he was trying to argue for. He was just going for "gotcha" responses.

If someone is trying to spread awareness of global warming, and someone asks this person "but the climate has changed before, why is it different now", and all the climate change awareness advocate can say is "well, uh, climate change is bad, ok" then it still reflects poorly on the advocate for not being able to defend what they're advocating, not on the person who may have been misinformed but was giving the advoca…

I've been the "dumb guy at the table" before.

Not for advocacy, but as a representative of an organization whose policy choices were very controversial for a group of stakeholders. (I cannot talk about specifics, which aren't relevant anyway)

It's not smart or productive to get into a public debate with people in that type of forum. You're there to deliver a message, and engaging in ad hoc public debate is unwise for your cause and disrespectful to your hosts. The only way to win is to not play the game; it's better to just end the conversation in the most tactful way possible (which may include playing dumb or remaining silent) or move it to a private forum.

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#267

Post by perseusprime11 »

abtinf wrote: post #21
perseusprime11 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real problem is that Everybody is afraid to share data with them because they know Watson will become better at the expense of company's business model.

Disclosure: I work in developer advocacy at IBM. The issue of data privacy and protection is complex. IBM provides explanations and opt-outs in many of the Watson services. For example, you can set the X-Watson-Learning-Opt-Out header on speech-to-text calls to prevent retention and use of your data for learning. [1] [1] https://www.ibm.com/watson/developercloud/doc/speech-to-text...

Are you saying that your model does not improve from learning from customer's data? If the answer is yes, then what prevents you from deploying the model at a customer's competitor?

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#268

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…

nulagrithom, I sent your feedback to the product team that owns that documentation. Their response is below. Could you please let me know more details about the issue you are running into?

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> Put out comprehensive documentation _on the indexable Internet_ and not in PDFs

But IBM does do exactly this--and more than a lot of companies!

For example, IBM Knowledge Center [1] houses the documentation for over 3000 IBM products and services, and offers up more than 13M english pages--without a sign-in even, and we translate our official content into over 30 languages.

IBM KC is very well indexed by Google, too (we take pains to make that happen).

We also offer custom search and links to more freely available IBM documentation. Our Cloud development docs--Bluemix docs, are also quite public, though some, it's true, are behind a cloud product sign-in.

Redbooks, too, are available in HTML, not just PDF. They can be found on the web and are indexed by Google too, as are articles from developerWorks and Technotes from Support.

So I really don't understand the complaint about our documentation. Almost none of it is behind a sign-in, let alone a for pay firewall, and almost all of it is freely available to anyone, not just our customers.

Hope this helps!

-------

[1] ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#269

Post by ucho »

mfoy_ wrote: post #247
tthayer wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get to use a transmogrified version of Jazz called IBM Control Desk. Literally dog shit.

At least it's not further wrapped in cat shit, I guess?

Now it is wrapped in "SmartCloud" instead. I am not sure if that is an improvement.

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#270

Post by keithpeter »

verdverm wrote: post #125

I quit IBM Watson 5 weeks ago. Here is why IBM is suffering. https://verdverm.com/2017/07/a-new-chapter/ PM me for more ;]

Not my circus and not my monkeys, but how long did you work for IBM?

Your blog post is short on actual dates (a time frame)

Best of luck

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