31–40 of 264 posts
Anyone know what "RA" stand for? The employees kept mentioning it on the "Watching IBM" blog. I couldn't find a decent match via Google. For ex: > IBM Watson Health has initiated a significant RA across multiple offices.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's double whammy for the Watson stuff, because not only did IBM lose track with AI, they also had that whole cloud thing whoosh by them. So not only do you have marketing telling outrageous lies about the abilities of their AI systems, they're also exaggerating the cloud angle where Watson is a cornerstone.
Possibly the most outrageous lie was calling it AI in the first place. Watson is a $@#% amazing information retrieval system. Information retrieval is only a small part of what people think of when they think, "AI".
Which I imagine still has lots of value on it's own for large, complicated data sets.
For a long while now, IBM has been treating "AI" as a product that can be managed, packaged, and sold by "general" business managers -- think MBA-types with only a superficial, qualitative grasp of deep learning and AI. Doing that with rapidly evolving technology is a sure-fire recipe for failure.
Most such MBA-types today are ill-equipped to manage, package, and sell "AI." They're roughly in the same position as English or History majors who are asked, say, to manage, package, and sell a new kind of quantum-computing technology without knowing or understanding much about quantum physics. The technology is moving faster than their ability to keep up.
IBM's mismanagement is a shame, because the system they showcased nearly a decade ago -- the one that competed and won in Jeopardy -- was state-of-the-art at the time.
> Both Phytel engineers say the offering managers didn’t have technical backgrounds and sometimes came up with ideas for new products that were simply impossible.
The death knell of all (potentially) good products. I don't know why this is so often the case. All software companies need engineers involved in product development decisions. Period. It's not optional.
Facebook who was smart about this. They hired or retrained technical people to fill many business roles in marketing, product development, project management, etc.
I'm not sure why technical people are restricted to merely being the builders in these companies. Lots of other companies recruit internally from people familiar with the end product and train them in other business areas.
> these potential customers weren’t impressed. Instead they asked for something resembling Phytel’s old system.
So they simply imagined a new product without interviewing potential customers beforehand on what they actually want? They spent years merging databases of two big systems, pivoted multiple times, to find out there wasn't a market for it in the first place?
Why aren't the 'offering management' people getting fired?
Is Watson a codebase? Or is it just a brand? It seems to me that Watson is basically just IBM's version of AWS/GCE services (at least the non infra ones). But it gets thrown around as a buzzword so often. The marketing makes it look like there's a single AI codebase that can be accessed through a bunch of APIs, but I would be very surprised if that was actually the case.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15456211
It's reasonably in depth and appears sincere.
tl;dr: it's a good search engine and a disparate set of machine learning tools. Sales is promising Hollywood AI, but the reality is that it takes a sizable project team to build anything worthwhile.
Scanning past commentary, it seems that startups are eating their lunch (more nimble, dedicated to customer space). I'll add that half the machine learning battle is getting access to data, so hyping the brand makes sense strategically.
In the middle, there are 100 layers of middle managers that completely cock everything up, and the really sad part is that they have enough say to really cause damage. One of my first proper white collar technical jobs with them was an L2 support job for this network performance monitoring suite for huge networks... mostly large, national ISPs and the like. The job required maybe a just-post-jr-level sys-admin knowlege of networks and UNIX systems while also having smooth customer service skills. Definitely a great step up from my previous lower-mid-level IT jobs and call center work.
I had three(3) managers. Three! I had a technical manager, a non-technical manager, and my actual manager, who was the head of the department.
At the highest levels, the management was talking about switching everybody's workstation over to Linux. Everybody from admin assistants to developers to managers was supposed to be moved off of Windows at some point in the relatively near future. I was psyched— I hated windows, and the product I supported ran on Solaris, so not having to deal with the extremely primitive (at the time) tools like Cygwin to get some UNIX functionality on my machine was great. They seemed to be positioning themselves to sell the consulting for other large companies to do the same thing.
Though we got no word of this internally— I only knew from what I had read in articles— I found the internal workstation disk image on the intranet and eagerly installed it. It was pretty smooth! I was excited! As I was getting my tools set up, I noticed that it didn't have the internal bug/ticket tracking clients installed, so I cruised on over to their intranet page... hmmm, nothing listed for Linux. After hours of searching, I found some internal discussion showing that, months earlier, the department that writes that software unilaterally decided that they were discontinuing their initiative to port those applications to Linux. While there was an extremely limited CLI to these tools, critical functionality was literally impossible without the GUI app. Without the ability for anybody on their Linux workstations to interact with tickets or bug reports, the Linux initiative was pretty much dead-in-the-water for most technical people and their managers.
Perfect example of just how badly their forest of middle managers completely messes up great executive initiatives that the bottom of the food chain really wants to embrace.
(I might have gotten some of the details wrong. It was 13 or 14 years ago and I drank a lot back then.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's double whammy for the Watson stuff, because not only did IBM lose track with AI, they also had that whole cloud thing whoosh by them. So not only do you have marketing telling outrageous lies about the abilities of their AI systems, they're also exaggerating the cloud angle where Watson is a cornerstone.
Possibly the most outrageous lie was calling it AI in the first place. Watson is a $@#% amazing information retrieval system. Information retrieval is only a small part of what people think of when they think, "AI".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Possibly the most outrageous lie was calling it AI in the first place. Watson is a $@#% amazing information retrieval system. Information retrieval is only a small part of what people think of when they think, "AI".
> amazing information retrieval system Which I imagine still has lots of value on it's own for large, complicated data sets.
I'd actually like to give Watson a spin for an IR problem I'm looking at, but, thanks to their hype machine being set to overdrive, they've got the thing priced in the "The Bold Leaders of the Future Creating a Bright New Tomorrow Full of People in Glasses Staring Wistfully Toward the Right Edge of the Photograph, While Blue Curvy Streaks Wave Through the Background and Random Zeroes and Ones Float Around Their Heads" tier. Sadly, I've only got a "businesses solving business problems" sized budget.