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I'm wondering why, as a company, IBM doesn't seem to be doing good in their core business, yet somehow they want us to believe they are at the forefront of the

I'm wondering why, as a company, IBM doesn't seem to be doing good in their core business, yet somehow they want us to believe they are at the forefront of the latest darling new technology in ML research and cognitive computing? If they are unable to attract talent and innovate in their core business, how are they supposedly pursuing sophisticated AI, and the biggest question, is why? What other products or innovations have come out of IBM Research? What is their overall reputation, and why should we believe them? Why don't they release Watson to the world, like Microsoft did with their twitter bot? If I were a recent grad or even mid level in my career and wanted to work on as interesting projects as I could, I wouldn't be going to IBM. My first priority would be access to interesting and varied datasets, such as what can be obtained at Facebook, Google, Amazon, or another such company. A close second would be any of the players in the hardware ML industry such as Nvidia. I don't understand what's so special about Watson, it all seems like marketing BS to me for a company in the death throws.

andars 10y ago
> What other products or innovations have come out of IBM Research? Are you asking just about recent developments in AI and ML, or in general?
EwanToo 10y ago
IBM spends billions of dollars in fairly fundamental technology R&D, they've built on of their strongest business models on licencing the patents they develop out to others, whether it's silicon improvements, disk density increases, or now, cognitive computing.
- throwzout 10y ago
  What actually-useful patents are you referring to? Genuinely curious.
  - NEDM64 10y ago
    For the sake of sanity, IBM was the company with most patents awarded last year. Is it that difficult to admit that they are well enough? If it were household names like Google or Apple, would help?
    - johnward 10y ago
      To be fair "most number of patents" doesn't mean they were good. They have an army of people whose sole responsibility is patenting anything they can in the hopes of enforcing that IP later.
throwzout 10y ago
IBM had been milking the cash cow with their CICS OLTP system for 40 years. Their blockchain project with Hyperledger is also full of baloney. There are plenty of groups that are innovating in that front, but IBM is far from it. But they're very good at marketing it. Watson, Hyperledger, quantum computing... whatever. If it came from IBM it isn't worth the dime.
rdtsc 10y ago
> IBM doesn't seem to be doing good in their core business, $80B / year in revenue is not Apple's $200B, but not sure I'd say it is "not doing good" either.
- fauigerzigerk 10y ago
  IBM's revenue has been declining for years, but analytics and cloud is their growth segment. The question is when the legacy stuff has become small enough to stop impacting overall results too much.
  - johnward 10y ago
    "analytics and cloud is their growth segment". Have been laying off employees in the segment as well as others.
kryptiskt 10y ago
"What other products or innovations have come out of IBM Research? What is their overall reputation, and why should we believe them?" 1986 Nobel Prize in Physics for the Scanning Tunneling Microscope 1987 Nobel Prize in Physics for High-temperature superconductors
- JoeAltmaier 10y ago
  ...30 years ago. I'd suggest joining a research team that has done something important since before you were born.
  - NEDM64 10y ago
    87 is 29 years ago.
YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
>> What other products or innovations have come out of IBM Research? Deep Blue winning over Gary Kasparov?
YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
>> What other products or innovations have come out of IBM Research? Also- the IBM models, like mentioned above. That's a bunch of NLP models that have been very influential and are still. If you studied NLP now, for instance, you'd hear about them when learning about NER or WSD etc.

andars 10y ago

> What other products or innovations have come out of IBM Research? Are you asking just about recent developments in AI and ML, or in general?

EwanToo 10y ago

IBM spends billions of dollars in fairly fundamental technology R&D, they've built on of their strongest business models on licencing the patents they develop out to others, whether it's silicon improvements, disk density increases, or now, cognitive computing.

throwzout 10y ago
What actually-useful patents are you referring to? Genuinely curious.
- NEDM64 10y ago
  For the sake of sanity, IBM was the company with most patents awarded last year. Is it that difficult to admit that they are well enough? If it were household names like Google or Apple, would help?
  - johnward 10y ago
    To be fair "most number of patents" doesn't mean they were good. They have an army of people whose sole responsibility is patenting anything they can in the hopes of enforcing that IP later.

throwzout 10y ago

IBM had been milking the cash cow with their CICS OLTP system for 40 years. Their blockchain project with Hyperledger is also full of baloney. There are plenty of groups that are innovating in that front, but IBM is far from it. But they're very good at marketing it. Watson, Hyperledger, quantum computing... whatever. If it came from IBM it isn't worth the dime.

rdtsc 10y ago

> IBM doesn't seem to be doing good in their core business, $80B / year in revenue is not Apple's $200B, but not sure I'd say it is "not doing good" either.

fauigerzigerk 10y ago
IBM's revenue has been declining for years, but analytics and cloud is their growth segment. The question is when the legacy stuff has become small enough to stop impacting overall results too much.
- johnward 10y ago
  "analytics and cloud is their growth segment". Have been laying off employees in the segment as well as others.

kryptiskt 10y ago

"What other products or innovations have come out of IBM Research? What is their overall reputation, and why should we believe them?" 1986 Nobel Prize in Physics for the Scanning Tunneling Microscope 1987 Nobel Prize in Physics for High-temperature superconductors

JoeAltmaier 10y ago
...30 years ago. I'd suggest joining a research team that has done something important since before you were born.
- NEDM64 10y ago
  87 is 29 years ago.

YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago

>> What other products or innovations have come out of IBM Research? Deep Blue winning over Gary Kasparov?

YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago

>> What other products or innovations have come out of IBM Research? Also- the IBM models, like mentioned above. That's a bunch of NLP models that have been very influential and are still. If you studied NLP now, for instance, you'd hear about them when learning about NER or WSD etc.