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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

#181

Post by deebosong »

sandworm101 wrote: post #93
duck_bacon wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was part of that acquisition. To be fair, Weather Channel was already running Weather Underground into the ground when they acquired it first. IBM just came in and helped them finished the job. A huge part of it was the incompetence with which IBM pushed us to use Watson modules in our products, which I could see 6 years ago were worse than open source AI options and had no application to Weather Underground's serv…

>> They were basically toy projects being advertised as ground-breaking AI. They were media events that lead to powerful media events, which in turn lead to investors pumping money into the stock price. Shareholder value is the only real profit. Watson being on Jeopardy no doubt garnered investment dollars from thousands of wealthy retirees. Those toy projects earned their keep many times over.

I don't mean to inject cryptocurrency cynicism & NFT skepticism into this discussion about IBM Watson...

But as someone who doesn't know the tech, but worked in the media side as a vendor at the tail end making marketing materials for IBM during their "Internet of Things" craze, I couldn't help but feel, as a laymen, so excited at what IoT (and other crazy developments like Watson) could be, because apparently IBM at the time was hitting up a buncha different vendors and just blanketing a certain sector of the marketing industry with jobs. Any colleagues I talked to were on some IBM marketing job or another.

Fast forward to about 7 years later, and I still have no clue what IoT is or does, but I sure saw a buncha marketing material flood mainstream media for a minute, with IBM saying it'd be revolutionary!

Just makes me think about web3/ crypto/ NFT's, how it's coming down hard with media campaigns, claims, yada yada. Definitely seems about hype & optics, just like IBM in their IoT media carpet bombing era.

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

#182

Post by rbanffy »

stefan_ wrote: post #168
300bps wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’re a public company. Here’s how they make money: https://www.ibm.com/investor/att/pdf/IBM-2Q-Earnings-Press-R...

That's a joke. If you read that drivel prepared for the stock market, you would come away thinking IBM is the biggest Cloud operator in the world. In reality of course they have just rebranded all kind of cash flow streams as "cloud" - because they know "cloud" will make the stock go up whereas "mainframe" makes it go down.

They also provide mainframe-based Linux VMs for clients that require the encryption technology built into those machines. If you need to give certain assurances by law or contract, they may be a good option. Apart from that, if you need on-demand VMs for IBM i or AIX, they are one of your only options.

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

#183

Post by theduder99 »

blip54321 wrote: post #80
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…

I was surprised by some companies too, until I worked outside of tech. The whole rest of the universe needs software too. Most companies are grossly incompetent to develop it themselves. Most are things that SWEs of the type which visit HN would never, ever want to work on. IBM does that adequately well. That's "services." If I need a tool built which will manage workflow at a management consulting firm, a custom too…

https://www.zdnet.com/article/ibm-now-has-more-workers-in-in...

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

#184

Post by sixQuarks »

HiJon89 wrote: post #160
mnd999 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self driving cars are just that, marketing. Tesla for all their hype have limited driver assist only and even Google who seem to have the most advanced offering only works in limited areas in good conditions and the dataset that drives it requires lots of maintenance. The general problem is too hard, and general practice has some of the same problems. Probably less adversarial data, but there’s still litigation to be…

Limited driver assist? Are all the videos of people using Tesla full self-driving on YouTube fake?

Yeah I’m shaking my head as well.

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

#185

Post by cantrememberpw8 »

I'm excited by this.

I recently left Red Hat for greener pastures. From where I sat, IBM was slowly turning toward wisdom again, having been run aground by its previous few CEOs. I was skeptical when IBM bought Red Hat, but after several years of not screwing it up, I'm pretty hopeful. Now, Krishna is working on streamlining the business and making the rest of IBM more like Red Hat. Splitting off the low performing Kyndryl, and selling Watson, are part of this by cutting obsolete sectors; focusing on getting Red Hat the resources it needs to rapidly accelerate, and on building the talent pool by hiring more junior engineers, are the positive changes working to turn IBM back into a powerhouse.

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

#186

Post by vasco »

FredPret wrote: post #110
oblio wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume that you're from the US? Those are both people problems. Tech can't solve many people problems, especially something as entrenched as healthcare. Isn't it huge, something like 10% of the US economy?

I thought to myself: no way can this be true. The US generates $21tr a year[1]. How can medical be $2.1tr a year? …turns out, it’s $2.7tr!!! [2] [1]www.tradingeconomics.com [2] https://www.statista.com/study/15826/health-care-and-social-...

20% https://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Sta....

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

#187

Post by deagle50 »

csallen wrote: post #132
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…

I've worked as a sales engineer/architect in teams selling to people like your stepdad's execs for almost a decade. I can 100% guarantee the sales reps and their leadership constantly practice "swagger" and remind each other of its importance. It's hilarious.

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

#188

Post by rbanffy »

nickysielicki wrote: post #91
colonwqbang wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a link to the commercial?

Yikes, I misremembered, it’s a Hewlett-Packard commercial. https://youtu.be/0EL3ZkcMNS4 This commercial still makes me laugh. The way she finishes his sentence with “our digital transformation” is the kicker.

HPE is kind of even more baffling. They make generic servers while, at least, IBM can sell you a brand new POWER 10 (running AIX, Linux or IBM i) or a mainframe. A new generation of mainframes is due this year and the crazy cache architectures they have shown last year is quite unique.

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

#189

Post by HollywoodZero »

nickysielicki wrote: post #91
colonwqbang wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a link to the commercial?

Yikes, I misremembered, it’s a Hewlett-Packard commercial. https://youtu.be/0EL3ZkcMNS4 This commercial still makes me laugh. The way she finishes his sentence with “our digital transformation” is the kicker.

I love these commercials that at the end everyone is sitting at their desks with their suit jackets still on. Who does this?

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

#190

Post by mrweasel »

twexler wrote: post #153
JediPig wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so I worked at IBM cloud, and can confirm this. They bought a cloud service, that by itself, and if left alone would been great. Soft(....something...) was the company... then IBM came and changed everything. I remember the SVP / President of ibm cloud showing up... talking 3 hours about how her son is so great and that we should 'follow' his example... after hour 3, man goes and interrupts and asks a question that w…

Softlayer is the name you're thinking of. They were pretty decent 10 or so years ago, but never touched them after the IBM acquisition.

Everyone wanted to be on Softlayer for a time. It was THE hosting provider. I don’t know if they where any good, but the got great press coverage.

Two years ago I had to help a customer debug some weird nginx behaviour, resulting in their traffic spiking at ten times the expected rate. The IBM/Softlayer VPN required that I used Internet Explorer, but it still failed to work. We spend three month with IBM and IBM Cloud consultants to make it NOT work.

IBM destroy everything it buys. They have POWER, their mainframes and associated software left. How that keeps them afloat is a mystery.

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