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IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

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Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#131

Post by Bombthecat »

ricardobayes wrote: post #59
saxonww wrote: post #14

I really expected that we'd see a change in my lifetime, that GPs in particular would be replaced by a lower-cost Watson descendant, with there being some other role for patient interaction, wet work, and data entry (perhaps just nurses). My mom worked for a GP for about 20 years, and it seemed to me that most of what made that guy a doctor was bedside manner + being able to remember a lot of things. But GPs often ma…

I thought the same, but as I grow older, I believe people would reject this. Even a subpar human GP would be much more accepted than a computer. That's not necessarily true in some societies though, e.g. Japan probably would accept it. That said, I would probably focus on fixing the system first in a way that a significant percent of population doesn't need to order fish medicine off amazon to get treatment.

I'm not so sure, sure the first generation might throw a tantrum, but the next generation will a accept it... Much like cars or trains..

Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#132

Post by csallen »

nickysielicki wrote: post #48

I do not understand how IBM stays in business. As far as I’m concerned the only cool engineering thing IBM does anymore is POWER, which has a sort of unique memory architecture but otherwise is well behind everyone else. What else did they do in my lifetime? They took a profitable RedHat and gutted it, they took the best Laptop line and sold it to Lenovo and almost ruined it, they tried to be a front runner in ML but…

My stepdad manages a team in IT for a very large, very slow company in the banking/financial sector. The decisions about what software and hosting solutions they'll use are made by execs at the upper echelons, probably over games of golf by people who don't know that much. They just know, "I really like Jim over at IBM, he's got a real swagger to his step" and "other big companies are using them" and "hell they just bought a Super Bowl commercial." So a $2M deal gets done, and IBM stays in business.

Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#134

Post by Jansen312 »

absoluteharam wrote: post #94
vishnugupta wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last I heard they were dabbling in Blockchain. Atleast they were publicly making noise about it.

Most big tech companies got out of or significantly scaled back their blockchain business, it is solution chasing a problem. The web3 people apparently haven’t caught on yet https://petri.com/blockchain-bust-microsoft-joins-ibm-with-b...

I think secretly they are aiming for the digital currency aspect of blockchain, e.g. Bitcoin but couldn't understand how it works as MBA schools havn't mint out bitcoin graduates yet. Maybe in abother 10 years.

Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#135

Post by tomrod »

This is wholly unsurprising. IBM's big play was to integrate data science methods into the workflow. But they approached it from a "we will replace your labor costs" versus "we will augment your labor costs." Besides their AI models being fairly poor in quality, technology doesn't replace people very well where extrapolation is needed. So the quality of service Watson brought was significantly lower than what these businesses offered prior to adoption. So keeping Watson became an exercise in how well the business understands sunk costs and switching costs.

Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#136

Post by Aeolun »

saxonww wrote: post #14

I really expected that we'd see a change in my lifetime, that GPs in particular would be replaced by a lower-cost Watson descendant, with there being some other role for patient interaction, wet work, and data entry (perhaps just nurses). My mom worked for a GP for about 20 years, and it seemed to me that most of what made that guy a doctor was bedside manner + being able to remember a lot of things. But GPs often ma…

> GPs often make astounding amounts of money while leaning heavily on their staff to actually handle patients and keep the business running

I’ve seen this in Japan (ish), but in the Netherlands it’s definitely the GP’s doing most of the job. The assistant just does bookings and waves me in when it’s my turn.

Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#137

Post by ta988 »

vishnugupta wrote: post #70
nickysielicki wrote: post #48

I do not understand how IBM stays in business. As far as I’m concerned the only cool engineering thing IBM does anymore is POWER, which has a sort of unique memory architecture but otherwise is well behind everyone else. What else did they do in my lifetime? They took a profitable RedHat and gutted it, they took the best Laptop line and sold it to Lenovo and almost ruined it, they tried to be a front runner in ML but…

Last I heard they were dabbling in Blockchain. Atleast they were publicly making noise about it.

Oh my, I saw a presentation of that. Dabbling is not even the word.

Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#138

Post by shane_b »

beckingz wrote: post #58
shane_b wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Currently they have one of the only if not the only enterprise permissioned blockchain project called fabric and it’s open source. I could see them making a comeback with crypto but not the way we think about it today. Instead, inter-enterprise operations infrastructure.

I attended a talk a few years ago given by one of the blockchain VPs at IBM. It turned out that under the hood they were just using conventional distributed database technology. All marketing in order to get multiple companies to work together on shared systems.

I believe it. There’s value in shared systems but not necessarily a special data store.

Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#139

Post by tomrod »

transfire wrote: post #75

The only real business problem is they didn’t program Watson to do what the Healthcare industry actually wants — make more $$$$$. The last thing they want is a computer that can actually diagnose people and provide effective solutions.

> The last thing they want is a computer that can actually diagnose people and provide effective solutions.

Intimately knowing the non-profit side of the healthcare system as well as the construction and operation of data science systems, I wholeheartedly disagree with your assertion and your conclusion as being a general takeaway.

Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#140

Post by jiscariot »

robk wrote: post #100
jiscariot wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in a role where half of our stuff is in IBM's cloud (for decisions made before my tenure). On a day in Mid-November, we started receiving alerts from our UAT and PROD environments. Logged in, all our stuff was gone. Opened a ticket and did some digging and found in our audit logs an IBM SRE had deleted all our stuff. They then told us there was no way to recover and we'd have to rebuild from scratch. They had…

That seems negligent enough for your company to sue them

We're a pretty small org, and not sure we have the organizational heft or resources to do so. That being said, the $1k discount they gave us for Nov based on the broken SLA (resources down) was kind of a slap in the face. We had our minimal core services up in 16hrs, but recorded about 100-120 internal engineering hours for config, testing, and other fallout +1 month.

When we opened the initial ticket, the IBM engineer kept saying "you should ask X why they deleted your stuff". Eventually after attaching the LinkedIn page for the IBM SRE in the audit logs, they realized something was screwed up on their side.

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