IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts • Hacker News Board

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

#341

Post by frost_knight » Sun, Jan 23, 2022, 6:14 PM UTC

zitsarethecure wrote: post #204

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…

> They took a profitable RedHat and gutted it, I know they bought Red Hat but I didn't hear that they gutted it. Can you expand on that?

Traveling consultant-architect for Red Hat here.

Before IBM purchase: Travel to clients, build and/or fix their things, suggest improvements.

After IBM purchase: Travel to clients, build and/or fix their things, suggest improvements.

At least from my side of Red Hat I've experienced zero changes in how I go about my work. In fact, my schedule is even more packed now, we can barely keep up with the demand. As far as I can tell IBM has left us alone to do our thing. Maybe it's different for other departments.

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

#342

Post by vidarh » Sun, Jan 23, 2022, 6:14 PM UTC

acdha wrote: post #283

shakna wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For breach of contract and negligence, IBM were successfully sued, and then banned from all future projects, by the Queensland government in 2013. [0] Which sets you up with a nice precedent and set of documents to see their angle of attack. > IBM will not be allowed to enter any new contracts with the State Government until it improves its governance and contracting practices. With that ban _still live today_, it as…

> For breach of contract and negligence, IBM were successfully sued, and then banned from all future projects, by the Queensland government in 2013. [0] Which sets you up with a nice precedent and set of documents to see their angle of attack. I mean, yes, but also think about how long a government can afford to have their lawyers pursue a case like that. If you don't have those kind of resources, it's a lot riskier.

They also have a very significant interest in pursuing it, in that they often have to follow procurement rules that prevent them from excluding vendors without good reason. If you think a vendor will be a problem in the future, getting a legal judgement in place may sometimes be necessary to save a lot of grief that a private company can avoid by just privately and quietly blacklisting the vendor in question.

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

#343

Post by nickdothutton » Sun, Jan 23, 2022, 6:14 PM UTC

Watson is a great example of what happens when your marketing is better than your product, or to be more accurate technology toolkit.

IBM will probably send RH the same way as they sent Softlayer.

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

#344

Post by akira2501 » Sun, Jan 23, 2022, 6:18 PM UTC

newsbinator wrote: post #117

rvense wrote: post #11

The technology they sent on Jeopard answered a question, I think, that was looking for the name of a specific king of Egypt with "What are trousers?". Seems pretty obvious that anything that would do that is not human-like intelligence, and probably the search results should be taken with a handful of salt even if they stuck some impressive natural language generation after it.

I'm okay with this: humans likely make hilariously bad guesses about things that are obvious and easily accessible to machines, and therefore the reverse is also true. Guessing "what are trousers" for king of Egypt isn't in itself an indicator the whole Watson system is flawed. Although you're right: it's an indicator the intelligence is non human-like. Just like, from Watson's perspective, a human named John making…

Humans understand the value of saying "I don't know" then their internally measured probability of accuracy is very low.

AIs don't seem to have that "gate," and to a human, it does make them appear to be very 'foolish' machines.

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

#345

Post by stathibus » Sun, Jan 23, 2022, 6:19 PM UTC

tekstar wrote: post #260

I worked for a large e-commerce company. I wanted to investigate putting all our support data into Watson and see what sort of recommendations it could provide, maybe a sort of auto-suggestion to help our customers. Three really funny points stand out from the experience: 1) To apply for Watson access you needed to show C-level approval, so our CEO put his name and phone number on the application (trying Watson was s…

IBM is famous for charging people for the privilege of talking to them, even if you're trying to sell them something.

This strategy makes sense if you consider that even in it's heyday Watson was 95% data science consulting firm and 5% actual valuable technology.

I really think Watson is one of the biggest tech marketing bamboozles of the 21st century. Through Jeopardy they really had a segment of the business world and the general public convinced that they had cracked AI, but behind the scenes it was all one-off custom solutions under one trademark.

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

#346

Post by blip54321 » Sun, Jan 23, 2022, 6:20 PM UTC

didip wrote: post #247

blip54321 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It's a major step up from Indian firms in terms of both price and quality. Will it be? Don't they outsource a lot of their subcomponents to Indian firms?

There is a world of difference between a US ship building company outsourcing to India and a US tech firm intermediating that transaction:

- A US intermediator can know the climate in India and navigate the cultural differences because they do this day in day out.

- A US tech company can properly vet whom they're subcontracting to because they have engineers in-house

- A US tech company will have a contract in US jurisdiction. If there is e.g. a data leak, there is liability through US courts. A step down from that, a US company can have US-based oversight and escalation mechanisms

- Social networks and relationships matter too. If you're working with Bob from the golf course, and his company messes up, you'll see Bob again next month at the golf course and chew him out.

... and so on.

I'm not suggesting you or I (personally) should subcontract through IBM, but for a US-based non-tech firm, it can make a lot of sense.

To flip this around, whom would you rather hire to do your accounting (presuming you're not an accountant and know nothing about accounting):

- A US company which outsources to India

- A random company in India

I would go for the former, since I know there would be liability if they messed up, and they'd make sure the US tax code was properly complied with. There's nothing wrong with the latter, but I'd have no way to vet them, and if they messed up, no recourse.

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

#347

Post by fooqux » Sun, Jan 23, 2022, 6:20 PM UTC

after_care wrote: post #251

projektfu wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a power move. Nobody got up and said, "Fuck you, I have better places to be." So they win. You probably thought it was about the business or something.

I have 100% opened up a laptop and tuned out a meeting like that. Never go to a corporate meeting without a laptop.

I used to do that too. Then I got accused of not being a team player or whatever. OK, fine.

Turns out sitting on my ass and listening to something useless pays the same.

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

#348

Post by jahewson » Sun, Jan 23, 2022, 6:20 PM UTC

thomasahle wrote: post #323

jahewson wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OTOH the average startup is garbage held together with duct tape that naturally falls apart without the founding team who created it. By the time of acquisition it’s usually reached a point of technical debt bankruptcy. This goes hand-in-hand with an over-heated sales team pushing hockey-stick growth that will crash back down when those brand-new customers churn at the next renewal - because the product, while nice-l…

> This goes hand-in-hand with an over-heated sales team pushing hockey-stick growth This seems like just another argument for limiting startup acquires. Perhaps if a big exit wasn't the goal, the company would focus on more long term viability. Anyway, I don't think they big companies care as much about whether they destroy value, as long as they destroy a potential competitor.

I see competition often being less about the startup and more about which other competing big tech company could buy the startup to consolidate an existing market strategy. I’d more charitably call it “revenue protection” to preemptively acquire them.

Startup acquisitions, in the absence of astoundingly deep due-diligence should probably be placed in portfolios where a 5:1 failure rate can be tolerated. I’m not sure how such an acquisition would be compensated.

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

#349

Post by throwaway4good » Sun, Jan 23, 2022, 6:22 PM UTC

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…

They have a very big consultancy business. Probably has a much better brand name than say Tata consulting. Plus their products like db2, websphere or openshift have thousands of businesses locked in.

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

#350

Post by narrator » Sun, Jan 23, 2022, 6:24 PM UTC

HollywoodZero wrote: post #180

jeremyjh wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they still make a lot of money from their legacy business, z/OS & mainframes, DB/2 etc still run basically all large banks, insurance companies and many other types of businesses. IBM can charge whatever they want for the hardware and services to support these things because their customers have no alternative. So they have just been farming this for decades, and can afford not to succeed at anything else (so…

Just like Oracle. No one talks about Oracle. But they're still around. We did a major tech project to migrate off of Oracle after an acquisition of a large org that was running it. It was a year-long effort to migrate. But it was worth it since Oracle renewal costs were going to be nearly 50% of our IT budget.

I did a similar year long migration off Oracle. What helped were all the automated integration tests that had been built previously. It made it so much easier to verify that everything would work after the migration.