Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check • Hacker News Board

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#291

Post by 0xbear » Sun, Jul 16, 2017, 6:34 AM UTC

Spooky23 wrote: post #266

jimmaswell wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So what do you do if you're called out for obvious BS?

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#292

Post by doublerebel » Sun, Jul 16, 2017, 1:03 PM UTC

lewisl9029 wrote: post #184

chipperyman573 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't IBM buy Cloudant? And wasn't it based off of an Apache application? Not saying it's not good (I've never used it), but IBM can't really get any credit for this. They just happen to have bought a decent product and now they sell it.

Right, my intention by pointing out Cloudant wasn't to offer it as a counter-example (I personally have 0 experience with it), but rather to see if anyone might have some red flags to share, as I'm considering using Cloudant instead of hosting my own CouchDB instances for a new project I'm speccing out, and especially since nobody has mentioned it as a counter-example in this thread so far.

I've been using Cloudant for several years and it's been extremely reliable. Support is good and they have contributed a ton of open source code and docs back to the community. The communication has been transparent throughout the IBM acquisition process so I feel confident in continuing to start new projects on the platform.

It's really easy (largely thanks to Cloudant) to host your own Couch instance but it's also really affordable to let them do it.

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#293

Post by daniellerommel » Mon, Jul 17, 2017, 8:31 PM UTC

tdb7893 wrote: post #238

hacksonx wrote: post #203

Fundamental software problems here. Probably the reason why software is being marketed as service more and more. IBM might be moving a little too fast, especially from a sales perspective but their systems offer features that will define the future.

The problem is that their systems aren't very good so if it's just APIs then it's more than likely a cloud provider would provide similar APIs and eat their lunch. The only thing they seem to really be able to do in this space is consulting

Did you ever see the comparison between IBM Watson and WolframAlpha? http://gizmodo.com/5766124/the-difference-between-watson-and... Worth checking out

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#294

Post by Vijayasankarv » Fri, Jul 21, 2017, 2:26 PM UTC

I do work for IBM. Here is my personal take for what it is worth. https://andvijaysays.com/2017/07/17/ibm-watson-is-just-fine-...

Re: Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check

#295

Post by rad_gruchalski » Tue, Jul 25, 2017, 7:29 PM UTC

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.

Vendor lock-in.