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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

#651

Post by geomark »

openknot wrote: post #577
ethbr0 wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This, 100%. Think about it another way: IBM et al. sales only lose by talking to lower-title folks. Best case, they lose control of the narrative as it's reported up internally, and someone higher up still has to approve it. Worst case, some engineer who actually knows their shit very quickly outlines why this can never work for the given problem. Once you're into the VP level, there's (usually) less technical knowle…

To add on, it's also a standard negotiation tactic for a negotiator to try and speak to the highest-ranking person possible. This tactic was specifically recommended by a guest speaker at a Stanford Business School seminar about how to negotiate uploaded to YouTube (timestamped to 31:59 for the relevant bit). [0] [0] (Seminar from 2007) https://youtu.be/rCmvMDrCWjs?t=1919

Yep. I used to do technical sales support. I would come in after the sales manager had broken the ice and arranged for some of the customer's technical team to listen to our proposed solution. But the sales training we got told us to always sell at the highest level possible, preferably the person who would sign the purchase order, not lower level technical people.

That didn't always work out. We sold a lot of stuff to Hewlett-Packard and they always forced most of the decisions down to the engineers. They would rarely let us talk to the people who could sign the purchase order. The sales people didn't like it much since they didn't have the control that they were used to. But it was kind of great for all of us technical people because we could sit around with the HP engineers and talk about technical stuff without a lot of sales-speak getting in the way.

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

#652

Post by bambataa »

throwaheyy wrote: post #452
WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> an IBM marketing team called HIS CELL and asked for ME. What the fuck is this? A name/email for your company when trying something out is so that you can keep track of any support requests we need, not for you to sell shit to me.

Yeah, the whole culture there (and other places like Oracle) is all about implanting mindshare at the decision-maker level and driving unilateral adoption from the top down. Pursuing such an approach is highly revealing because if the technology actually worked , that approach would not be necessary. Once they’re “in” at the decision-maker level, they can continue to milk the organisation with long-duration support a…

> Once they’re “in” at the decision-maker level, they can continue to milk the organisation with long-duration support and consulting contracts, feeding parasitically and gradually becoming more and more entangled.

IBM seems like a really interesting case study in parasitism at the organisational level. Just moving around, feeding from host to host. I wonder if anyone’s studied it in those terms.

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

#653

Post by saberdancer »

touisteur wrote: post #647
ethbr0 wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This, 100%. Think about it another way: IBM et al. sales only lose by talking to lower-title folks. Best case, they lose control of the narrative as it's reported up internally, and someone higher up still has to approve it. Worst case, some engineer who actually knows their shit very quickly outlines why this can never work for the given problem. Once you're into the VP level, there's (usually) less technical knowle…

But wouldn't a competent VP, C-level just shrug and say 'I want technical approval first from my teams, we don't do favorites here, my time is precious and you're making me lose precious amount of it? I had a business unit manager answer that to such queries that way and it felt like good management... Isn't the whole shtick about management to be able to delegate and trust your org?

"Nobody ever got fired for buying an IBM."

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

#654

Post by circlefavshape »

mrtksn wrote: post #550
akudha wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

640$, lol My entire wardrobe costs less than that, and no, I am not lying. It must be nice to have enough money to spend on such luxury. Is it really that much better than a $10 t-shirt?

Oh, it is much better than a $10 shirt but its utility doesn't come from it's comfort or purely aesthetics IMHO. Maybe it's silly but people do judge from appearance because it tells something about you. I have been watching this famous fashion photographer and he was talking about using an iPhone for last photoshoot and he noted that he can do it and charge full price for it only because he already has a name in the…

The nerd costume is a costume too. If I'm wearing a t-shirt and a battered hoodie in a meeting with a bunch of suits, then everyone is going to defer to me on technical matters

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

#655

Post by smackeyacky »

saberdancer wrote: post #653
touisteur wrote: post #647

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But wouldn't a competent VP, C-level just shrug and say 'I want technical approval first from my teams, we don't do favorites here, my time is precious and you're making me lose precious amount of it? I had a business unit manager answer that to such queries that way and it felt like good management... Isn't the whole shtick about management to be able to delegate and trust your org?

"Nobody ever got fired for buying an IBM."

I knew a couple of people who got fired after getting their org sucked into WebSphere. Long time ago but it does happen occasionally.

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

#656

Post by smackeyacky »

akudha wrote: post #544
sgt101 wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are the best ones I've ever worn : https://turnbullandasser.co.uk/products/white-west-indian-se...

640$, lol My entire wardrobe costs less than that, and no, I am not lying. It must be nice to have enough money to spend on such luxury. Is it really that much better than a $10 t-shirt?

A crisp, blinding white, heavy oxford cotton shirt that requires cufflinks is noticed by everybody but nerds. In financial circles you can even wear colored shirts but don't stray from blue or pink.

The people who wear those shirts also have expensive shoes. Get the tie right and you can get away with a slightly less expensive suit for technical sales meetings.

A clean shave and neat, well cut hair help too.

Its interesting to look at shoes, tells you a lot about a persons status in a big organisation.

Having said that, my daughter bought me some checkerboard vans so I wear those everywhere now.

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

#657

Post by smackeyacky »

circlefavshape wrote: post #654
mrtksn wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, it is much better than a $10 shirt but its utility doesn't come from it's comfort or purely aesthetics IMHO. Maybe it's silly but people do judge from appearance because it tells something about you. I have been watching this famous fashion photographer and he was talking about using an iPhone for last photoshoot and he noted that he can do it and charge full price for it only because he already has a name in the…

The nerd costume is a costume too. If I'm wearing a t-shirt and a battered hoodie in a meeting with a bunch of suits, then everyone is going to defer to me on technical matters

Maybe. Mostly they want to keep you on board long enough to find out who writes the cheques.

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

#658

Post by krageon »

smsm42 wrote: post #609
jonas21 wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you're still a student, I feel like maybe I can offer some advice: First, I think you're getting the wrong lesson from this. The key takeaway is stay to away from IBM. Almost everyone in the field has known that Watson is a bunch of marketing hype since day one. It's no surprise that Watson Health didn't work out. That doesn't mean that everything is overhyped, and it's important to develop a good sense for wha…

I don't think NLP is the problem here. Even if you crack NLP perfectly and would somehow be able to build a semantic map, or whatever your technology would use, of the user request with perfect fidelity, there's still the question of actually understanding what it's about. Perfect NLP would help in very limited number of situation where the meaning is clear - i.e. doing some pre-defined action, like closing an accoun…

> there's still the question of actually understanding what it's about.

Philosophically interesting, but in practice entirely unimportant. What you want is something that speaks like a human would speak in a similar environment, then the issue (getting the correct responses) is solved. Whether or not it actually understands won't change a thing about that situation.

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

#659

Post by smackeyacky »

Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #645
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…

I concur with the experience of dealing with IBM sales. Years ago my client wanted me to checkout out IBM mobile app builder - Worklight, The pricing wasn't available on website and so I had to contact them. Soon I was reached out by their sales department and before I could get any details on the pricing I was speaking with VP of sales. If I remember it correctly, It was priced ~>150K USD and even after repeatedly t…

IBM don't want to deal with startups. They need big, old, ossified, cashed up businesses who are in some kind of trouble. There isn't any money in most startups that bootstrapped off a pile of open source or free tech.

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

#660

Post by krageon »

makapuf wrote: post #637
listenallyall wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all, the vast majority of devs do NOT stay "up to date." Most know one language or even just one platform... i.e. "WordPress developer" or "Oracle admin". Secondly, how do you think YOU hear about new technologies... usually due to marketing. Did React just come out of nowhere? No, Facebook marketed it relentlessly. Did people discover Kotlin on their own? No, JetBrains and Google hit people over the head wi…

Is it really the case that Facebook marketed heavily React? Why? What do they gain from it? Real question, or not like react was an entry point to their API?

It was fairly obvious when it was an up and coming thing. They sent out engineers to talk about it, you had these articles popping up about it more or less out of nowhere, etc. If you weren't there (which I'm guessing you're not, otherwise why would you ask), it is hard to imagine. Perhaps it makes more sense when you consider how normal "advertorials" are now.
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