The part that made me certain this is more a marketing effort than a technical effort is when they described it as a followup to "Watson" and "blockchain". "Wa

The part that made me certain this is more a marketing effort than a technical effort is when they described it as a followup to "Watson" and "blockchain". "Watson" is currently a brand name for a bunch of miscellaneous NLP consulting, capitalizing on a fact that they made a very specific NLP system for answering Jeopardy questions that won on Jeopardy. The fact that the name is famous, but businesses are not actually looking to answer trivia questions, has required some marketing contortions. "Blockchain" is, for one thing, a bunch of neat mathematics. It's also an enterprise fad that involves ignoring the neat mathematics. The logic for the fad is something like this: Bitcoin made a ton of money by decentralizing money, evading currency controls, wasting power, and selling drugs. We want to make a ton of money too! We'd rather not decentralize anything, piss off governments, increase our electric bill, or sell drugs, but maybe there's something else in there that makes money. Whatever that is, let's call it "blockchain". I don't see a coherent category that includes Watson, blockchain, and quantum, as the author of this press release believes exists. But if I had to extrapolate: IBM will provide an API for running a vaguely-related set of algorithms. The entire API will actually run on classical computers, but some of it will involve quantum simulators. They will leverage the confusion about where the quantum part is to sell consulting to companies where a manager has put the cart before the horse and decided they need some quantum right now.