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IBM vastly over promises with their marketing. It is so frustrating to have to answer questions from the CEO about why we don't solve all our problems with magi

IBM vastly over promises with their marketing. It is so frustrating to have to answer questions from the CEO about why we don't solve all our problems with magic beans from IBM's Watson. I understand that this is what they want. They want to drive executives' interest in the product, but I believe they do so at the expense of their goodwill with the tech community. Am I the only one who cringes when these ads air? Edit: "magic beans" is harsh and it isn't that I don't think their tools are good. My point is that they put you in a position where it seems very unlikely to meet expectations.

_delirium 9y ago
"Watson" made more sense to me when I realized it was just a branding term for any AI-related product, API, or service offered by IBM, which vary widely in functionality. That fact is not that hidden [1], but their marketing doesn't exactly emphasize it. If you view it that way, "Watson" should just be compared against any other similarly broad AI-as-a-service offering with strengths and weaknesses, not treated as some integrated Intelligence that will solve all your problems. [1] E.g. they're pretty open about renaming existing things to fit under the Watson brand: https://www.ibm.com/blogs/bluemix/2016/10/predictive-analytics-renamed-watson-machine-learning-service/ https://www.ibm.com/blogs/bluemix/2016/10/predictive-analyti...
- blazespin 9y ago
  It might be more honest if they said "IBM Data AI Division."
  - tomjakubowski 9y ago
    "IBM DAD"? :) More seriously, do you think Microsoft would have been more honest if they'd called Windows "Microsoft Graphical Multitasking Operating System"? Or if BMW had gone with "BMW Better Performance And A Cooler Badge But It'll Cost You" instead of "BMW M"? Brand names exist for a reason.
    - RRWagner 9y ago
      Why not just call it "Watson Systems"?
      - komali2 9y ago
        Stop, I'm getting fucking flashbacks to our early product design meetings.
        moccachino 9y ago
        You have more interesting meetings than I have..
      - chongli 9y ago
        Because IBM markets to CEOs, not IT staff. They want their customers excitedly talking about Jeopardy-winning, superhuman AI at the dinner table. Technical people won't do that.
  - dotancohen 9y ago
    How about: With All The Shit On Nails Hmm, I'm having a hard time figuring out the N. Ideas?
    - semi-extrinsic 9y ago
      "With All The Shit One Needs"?
- jacinabox 9y ago
  Anyone with a passing familiarity for Watson does view it that way.
  - LoSboccacc 9y ago
    Eh this is more of a recent development. Originally it was the natural language processing and knowledge extraction engine. That is a hard sell because requires a truckload of configuration and internal expertise to get a working product out of it, and it ever only solves only some very narrow ranges of solutions. In typical IBM style, since they can't have a multimillion research division going in red as that would get a bunch of management in trouble, they moved more and more product under the watson name to pad up the division growth and sales numbers. That's the point where it is now after hoarding anything internal with value. You can see more or less the same with their cloud offer.
  - SamBam 9y ago
    They may understand it in theory, but I wonder how many middle-managers still have a gut-feeling that they're hiring that "super-smart AI guy who won Jeopardy" to work for them?
girvo 9y ago
The sad part is, that my experience with the actual "in the trenches" devs, they're much more realistic about what the various things their tech can actually achieve are; and they genuinely are doing some interesting stuff. But that said, I've only been in contact with them for a couple months, and mostly left to my own devices and given cool hardware to play with, so I'm kind of biased heh.
abtinf 9y ago
Disclosure: I work in developer advocacy at IBM. Thank you for sharing your view. If you'd like to talk more about how we can better message our offerings, please feel free to reach out. I'd love to learn more about the kinds of problems you are trying to solve. Edit: yes, I know, this is a bland response to the parent. But change needs feedback. Edit 2: thanks matt4077
- artursapek 9y ago
  This reply all but confirms the parent's comment.
- boyce 9y ago
  Surely a parody
- valarauca1 9y ago
  I hate to say it but this comment is a lot of problem. It reads like it was generated from Watson, then approved by HR and Legal with minor edits. I don't want to say that's your fault. I get it, I have a job too. --- Honestly I wonder what IBM does these days. Watson is a professional service Machine Learning thing, which can't be profitable. Onsite engineers enguaging one customer rarely is. Power8/9 has flopped. Nvidia only appears to be on board to kick sand in Intel's eyes. Then there's... Mainframes? I know IBM has a cloud now, but honestly it's prices are far high then AWS or Azure.
- phs318u 9y ago
  What makes you think I am trying to solve?
  - abtinf 9y ago
    In the jobs I've held, getting asked by the CEO to look into a technology means there is some underlying problem or opportunity.
    - ingenuous2 9y ago
      Agreed. But the community of problem solvers does not frequently overlap with the community of people willing to listen to salesmen. Yes, there are opportunities. No, I do not believe IBM could solve mine, because of the overpromise, underdeliver. I would only speak with a sales team, or a PM, if my boss ordered me to.
ben_jones 9y ago
It didn't bug me until 60 minutes did a full blown 15 minute commercial for IBM on how Watson is saving the world. No I will not leave a link to that absurd piece.
- pgodzin 9y ago
  I'm a SWE at Watson Health. What do you think was so absurd about it? It definitely didn't explain the constraints and limitations well enough (it won't diagnose any problem you can have), but for the cancer scenario the segment centered on, the Watson solution is indeed able to greatly assist doctors with a task that does not scale well for them.
  - ben_jones 9y ago
    Unfortunately its an emotional argument for me as it led to a 30 minute discussion over the phone with my father on the limitations of AI and the current state of marketing from most technology products. Theirs at least one post in this thread that goes into detail on the limitations of Watson Health (it mentioned oversold capabilities that led to a medical institution wasting ~$60 million dollars, but you would be right to point out that I have no direct examples from memory on why the 60 minutes coverage itself was 'absurd'. If anything its the effectiveness of Watson marketing (and other companies marketing of AI) that gets to me and how it is even becoming pervasive in cultural icons like 60 minutes.
  - UnquietTinkerer 9y ago
    I think the 60 Minutes segment was just marketing copy handed to them by IBM (how else could they talk for 20 minutes about cutting-edge ML without mentioning Google or Amazon at all?). Watson is introduced as "an AI" - singular - designed to play Jeopardy and then, after he wins, nobly re-purposed to medicine. Charlie Rose even says at one point that "they taught Watson to diagnose cancer", implying that it was the same Watson who won Jeopardy. The truth is the original Watson is on display in a glass case somewhere and the new "Watson" shares only the name and some of the underlying ML techniques. It might be easy to understand what Charlie really meant when you are already familiar with the project, but the non-technical viewer will walk away thinking of Watson as a single, coherent entity sitting in an IBM vault somewhere. Conflating ML-based expert systems with anthropomorphic AI is farcical, supporting the accusations that IBM is overselling its product. It is also irresponsible, because it fuels the idea in the popular mind that machine learning is creating independent intelligences rather than mere tools.
maxxxxx 9y ago
This certainly works with the IT department and top executives in my company. I have seen Watson mentioned in a ton of presentations and they are all super excited about it. In the last 12 months I have been trying to find out about anything concrete they are doing but so far nothing. It seems all talk.
- R_haterade 9y ago
  Lol. You don't understand. It's a fantastic way to seem like you're doing something innovative when you're not really doing anything at all. The good ones use it as a smoke screen to cover for doing things that need to be done but that the C-level isn't necessarily going to like, the bad ones use it as a cover for incompetence. The fact that you're more concerned about the truth is why you'll never be on the take like them. :-)
  - maxxxxx 9y ago
    Funny, you say that. Today I got feedback from someone that my bullshitting skills are not up to snuff and that I still have the naive idea that actual results count in the end :-)
    - R_haterade 9y ago
      Old saying: "Life is hard, even harder if you're stupid." We were too stupid to catch on that everybody else is lying.
- throwaway7645 9y ago
  I recommend you read Dilbert more often.
wmccullough 9y ago
I'm happy to be harsh because I've had years and years of experience dealing with IBM. Their tools are trash for the cost they want. The majority of their offerings are overengineered and prone to failure in a production setting. They are pros at selling to non-technical management, all the while IT employees get stuck dealing with the aftermath. We ended up getting stuck with the IBM version of work item management, called Jazz Team Concert. From the "source control" to the actual setup and configuration, the product was a nightmare. The worst part was when we looked at license renewal. They wanted three quarters of a million dollars for something that was essentially dog shit wrapped in cat shit. In case you thought I might be on the fence with IBM, I'll add one final clarifying point: Fuck IBM.
- nthcolumn 9y ago
  Hey Willie I'm feeling some negative customer feedback here.
- emmelaich 9y ago
  Yeah, IBM (and Oracle, and SAP and ...) have always been like this. My own anecdote -- we had a need for a GIS/charting/mapping system. IBM responded to the RFP as did many others. IBM proposed an entire office automation system with a minor charting system hanging off the side somewhere. Most of the components were unfamiliar to everyone. Though maybe there was Wordperfect or Lotus Notes in there. I remember meetings with IBM always had whole bunch of shiny suits whereas more focussed proposals just had one or two people visit. After one or two rounds of pointless meetings our fairly technical director told them to go fuck off and never come back.
- filereaper 9y ago
  Hey man, you're not alone, even internal teams at IBM using Jazz Team Concert have been calling it "dog shit wrapped in cat shit" for years now. Don't be so harsh on all of IBM, its like hundreds of companies under one banner. Not all of them have the power to influence other products and often times end up stuck with it and cannot move on to other tools (i.e git). More often than not, customers have higher priority on bugs than other teams dog-fooding the product. Its insane.
R_haterade 9y ago
I recently sat through a sales pitch for a piece of IBM software that has an intensely focused (and better) competitor. IBM's sales pitch was that 1) this particular piece of software was "central to IBM's [market niche] strategy", and 2) if we didn't go with IBM's product, we would miss out on all the interoperability with IBM's Watson that the future is going to bring. The tone veered toward fire-and-brimstone. I wasn't sold, I was put off. They've demoed other things in the past that I've had my socks knocked off by, but they're nothing that's the sort of "indistinguishable from magic" that they're promising in all the marketing hype. The thing is, IBM delivers tremendous value, and they have some fantastic products. However, stunts like that leave people like me with a very sour taste in my mouth. If they'd just focus on delivering a better product, as quantified by hard metrics, (which they could easily afford to do), they'd keep making out like bandits for a very long time. There's tremendous good-will toward them in the market: bad experience aside, I'm still favorably disposed toward them.
- heracles 9y ago
  May I ask whom the competitor was/is? We are closing on the IBM bandwagon, but I want to show that there is alternatives.
  - R_haterade 9y ago
    It could out me. I'd like to hang on to my job, and we're not allowed to be critical of IBM.
    - ohquu 9y ago
      It's IBM, isn't it?
    - heracles 9y ago
      I'm upvoting you doing The Right Thing, but I'd like to downvote the reality instead:/
blueyes 9y ago
The only machine working over at Watson is the PR machine. It's astonishing how much IBM has spent to achieve so little. Per the Jefferies report, IBM spent $15 billion in Cognitive from 2010 to 2015, not including an additional $5 billion in data acquisitions. Even if Cognitive weren't a marketing buzzword invented by IBM to describe if-then statements, that would still be deeply embarrassing. (You could probably double the number of startups funded in Silicon Valley in a year with $20 billion dollars, and I'll bet you'd get much higher returns.) When you look at the main open-source AI frameworks, none of them were created by IBM, because IBM was incapable of building them. There are individual startups that have done more in AI, using far fewer resources. And the real shame is that IBM is convincing rubes to buy their cognitive trash, and the rubes are doing it. And when the rubes' bosses realize that the rubes blew the AI budget and the "AI" delivered nothing, those rubes are getting canned. You can get fired for buying IBM. I've seen it. There's a Madoff-like quality to IBM's Watson sales strategy. The more they fail, the wider they circle to depend on dumber and dumber money from abroad. They're going after rural Scandinavia. They're selling to 3rd-tier cities in China. Just imagining targeting a buyer with the sophistication of the mayor of Mobile, Alabama. That's where IBM Watson is selling strong. IBM has been poisoning the well in the AI industry for years, teaching customers to be gun-shy and scared of an important technology, just because they blew their money on a dog to begin with. I don't believe an AI winter will come, but if it did, IBM would be the main culprit. Even if Watson's many mysterious technologies worked, they would still have a lame business model, because most of AI, and the best of AI tooling, is open source. IBM's trying to sell a secret sauce, even as it declines to participate in competitions that would should how Watson stacks up against other tech. Oren Etzioni has been calling them out for years. [1,2,3] Anyone wondering how IBM came to this sorry pass should read Robert Cringely's "The Decline and Fall of IBM." It's a company run by a clueless management class, who probably believe the smoke they're blowing up everyone else's ass. That's the scary part: The C-suite at IBM actually bought that hype about Watson, until they started to see the numbers, and the numbers sucked. That's why they don't break them out in the quarterly earnings reports. IBM is not signing up the Watson partners it thought it would. [0] Watson makes claims to solve everything. But when you dig in with the sales people, the only success story they cite is Memorial Sloan Kettering (MSK). It's suspicious, considering how many other organizations they must have worked with. H&R block is bragging about Watson technology, too, but that's just because they think the marketing gimmick will work for them as well as it's worked for IBM. The real problem in a situation like this is that very few people have an incentive to get the truth out. IBM doesn't want its stock price to dive. And all the customers are mortified that they failed and wasted their money. And they probably had to sign some non-disparagement clause to boot. [0] http://www.cringely.com/2016/09/07/carrie-underwoods-american-idol-success-teaches-us-ibms-watson-failure/ http://www.cringely.com/2016/09/07/carrie-underwoods-america... [1,2,3] https://twitter.com/etzioni/status/654486809825570817 https://twitter.com/etzioni/status/654486809825570817 https://twitter.com/etzioni/status/785639012161630208 https://twitter.com/etzioni/status/785639012161630208 https://twitter.com/etzioni/status/861231962853224448 https://twitter.com/etzioni/status/861231962853224448
raverbashing 9y ago
That was always ibm's business model: convince higher ups to buy it, often in detriment of who uses it
nameless912 9y ago
> beans I'm reminded of the horrors of early-2000s enterprise Java.
cirgue 9y ago
> "magic beans" is harsh IBM sells an image, not a working product, and they deserve some ridicule for it. I have worked with Watson and a decently large IBM consulting team, and 'magic beans' is a diplomatic way of putting it. 'Obfuscatory horse shit' is more accurate.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
davidgerard 9y ago
> It is so frustrating to have to answer questions from the CEO about why we don't solve all our problems with magic beans from IBM's Watson. could be worse, could be magic beans from IBM Blockchain.
nthcolumn 9y ago
'AI is the New Electricity' and people are moaning about Watson being over-hyped? Electricity was real and delivered immediate benefits. AI does not even exist yet! Imagine I could give you a true AI. yay! Unfortunately,it has the IQ of a 9 year old. Do you want to license that at great expense to make key business decisions for your company? All that Jeopardy and chess has become real double-edged now. People don't seem to get how thick-skulled pointy-haired bosses are. We are probably a century away from that. We can do some great inference from big data sets that will help invent cures for diseases and many things but it isn't a panacea. It isn't 'finicky' some applications will lend themselves more than others. I wouldn't worry too much about the IBM talent pool either. And yes okay disclosure ex-bluesuit.
debacle 9y ago
I don't know if magic beans was overharsh considering the degree to which IBM portrays Watson as some sort of universal spanner for all problems.
totalZero 9y ago
"Magic Beans" is accurate. Not sure if you've seen an IBM presentation covering Watson at an investor conference, but it's pretty much entirely hand waving and hocus pocus.
doug1001 9y ago
gives me some solace to know others find themselves in this position. I remember nearly two years ago, i found some Oracle market brochures directed to BI 'solutions'--courtesy of an Oracle sales rep who sat next to CTO on a 12-hour business class flight--on my desk with a stick note from our CTO "please review, then let's chat". As ordered, i diligently read each pretentious little piece of trivia in the pile, then asked him what specific functionality the Oracle stack offered that our open-source stack did not. He said "360 view of the customer", which i had just read about a dozen times.

_delirium 9y ago

"Watson" made more sense to me when I realized it was just a branding term for any AI-related product, API, or service offered by IBM, which vary widely in functionality. That fact is not that hidden [1], but their marketing doesn't exactly emphasize it. If you view it that way, "Watson" should just be compared against any other similarly broad AI-as-a-service offering with strengths and weaknesses, not treated as some integrated Intelligence that will solve all your problems. [1] E.g. they're pretty open about renaming existing things to fit under the Watson brand: https://www.ibm.com/blogs/bluemix/2016/10/predictive-analytics-renamed-watson-machine-learning-service/ https://www.ibm.com/blogs/bluemix/2016/10/predictive-analyti...

blazespin 9y ago
It might be more honest if they said "IBM Data AI Division."
- tomjakubowski 9y ago
  "IBM DAD"? :) More seriously, do you think Microsoft would have been more honest if they'd called Windows "Microsoft Graphical Multitasking Operating System"? Or if BMW had gone with "BMW Better Performance And A Cooler Badge But It'll Cost You" instead of "BMW M"? Brand names exist for a reason.
  - RRWagner 9y ago
    Why not just call it "Watson Systems"?
    - komali2 9y ago
      Stop, I'm getting fucking flashbacks to our early product design meetings.
      - moccachino 9y ago
        You have more interesting meetings than I have..
    - chongli 9y ago
      Because IBM markets to CEOs, not IT staff. They want their customers excitedly talking about Jeopardy-winning, superhuman AI at the dinner table. Technical people won't do that.
- dotancohen 9y ago
  How about: With All The Shit On Nails Hmm, I'm having a hard time figuring out the N. Ideas?
  - semi-extrinsic 9y ago
    "With All The Shit One Needs"?
jacinabox 9y ago
Anyone with a passing familiarity for Watson does view it that way.
- LoSboccacc 9y ago
  Eh this is more of a recent development. Originally it was the natural language processing and knowledge extraction engine. That is a hard sell because requires a truckload of configuration and internal expertise to get a working product out of it, and it ever only solves only some very narrow ranges of solutions. In typical IBM style, since they can't have a multimillion research division going in red as that would get a bunch of management in trouble, they moved more and more product under the watson name to pad up the division growth and sales numbers. That's the point where it is now after hoarding anything internal with value. You can see more or less the same with their cloud offer.
- SamBam 9y ago
  They may understand it in theory, but I wonder how many middle-managers still have a gut-feeling that they're hiring that "super-smart AI guy who won Jeopardy" to work for them?

girvo 9y ago

The sad part is, that my experience with the actual "in the trenches" devs, they're much more realistic about what the various things their tech can actually achieve are; and they genuinely are doing some interesting stuff. But that said, I've only been in contact with them for a couple months, and mostly left to my own devices and given cool hardware to play with, so I'm kind of biased heh.

abtinf 9y ago

Disclosure: I work in developer advocacy at IBM. Thank you for sharing your view. If you'd like to talk more about how we can better message our offerings, please feel free to reach out. I'd love to learn more about the kinds of problems you are trying to solve. Edit: yes, I know, this is a bland response to the parent. But change needs feedback. Edit 2: thanks matt4077

artursapek 9y ago
This reply all but confirms the parent's comment.
boyce 9y ago
Surely a parody
valarauca1 9y ago
I hate to say it but this comment is a lot of problem. It reads like it was generated from Watson, then approved by HR and Legal with minor edits. I don't want to say that's your fault. I get it, I have a job too. --- Honestly I wonder what IBM does these days. Watson is a professional service Machine Learning thing, which can't be profitable. Onsite engineers enguaging one customer rarely is. Power8/9 has flopped. Nvidia only appears to be on board to kick sand in Intel's eyes. Then there's... Mainframes? I know IBM has a cloud now, but honestly it's prices are far high then AWS or Azure.
phs318u 9y ago
What makes you think I am trying to solve?
- abtinf 9y ago
  In the jobs I've held, getting asked by the CEO to look into a technology means there is some underlying problem or opportunity.
  - ingenuous2 9y ago
    Agreed. But the community of problem solvers does not frequently overlap with the community of people willing to listen to salesmen. Yes, there are opportunities. No, I do not believe IBM could solve mine, because of the overpromise, underdeliver. I would only speak with a sales team, or a PM, if my boss ordered me to.

ben_jones 9y ago

It didn't bug me until 60 minutes did a full blown 15 minute commercial for IBM on how Watson is saving the world. No I will not leave a link to that absurd piece.

pgodzin 9y ago
I'm a SWE at Watson Health. What do you think was so absurd about it? It definitely didn't explain the constraints and limitations well enough (it won't diagnose any problem you can have), but for the cancer scenario the segment centered on, the Watson solution is indeed able to greatly assist doctors with a task that does not scale well for them.
- ben_jones 9y ago
  Unfortunately its an emotional argument for me as it led to a 30 minute discussion over the phone with my father on the limitations of AI and the current state of marketing from most technology products. Theirs at least one post in this thread that goes into detail on the limitations of Watson Health (it mentioned oversold capabilities that led to a medical institution wasting ~$60 million dollars, but you would be right to point out that I have no direct examples from memory on why the 60 minutes coverage itself was 'absurd'. If anything its the effectiveness of Watson marketing (and other companies marketing of AI) that gets to me and how it is even becoming pervasive in cultural icons like 60 minutes.
- UnquietTinkerer 9y ago
  I think the 60 Minutes segment was just marketing copy handed to them by IBM (how else could they talk for 20 minutes about cutting-edge ML without mentioning Google or Amazon at all?). Watson is introduced as "an AI" - singular - designed to play Jeopardy and then, after he wins, nobly re-purposed to medicine. Charlie Rose even says at one point that "they taught Watson to diagnose cancer", implying that it was the same Watson who won Jeopardy. The truth is the original Watson is on display in a glass case somewhere and the new "Watson" shares only the name and some of the underlying ML techniques. It might be easy to understand what Charlie really meant when you are already familiar with the project, but the non-technical viewer will walk away thinking of Watson as a single, coherent entity sitting in an IBM vault somewhere. Conflating ML-based expert systems with anthropomorphic AI is farcical, supporting the accusations that IBM is overselling its product. It is also irresponsible, because it fuels the idea in the popular mind that machine learning is creating independent intelligences rather than mere tools.

maxxxxx 9y ago

This certainly works with the IT department and top executives in my company. I have seen Watson mentioned in a ton of presentations and they are all super excited about it. In the last 12 months I have been trying to find out about anything concrete they are doing but so far nothing. It seems all talk.

R_haterade 9y ago
Lol. You don't understand. It's a fantastic way to seem like you're doing something innovative when you're not really doing anything at all. The good ones use it as a smoke screen to cover for doing things that need to be done but that the C-level isn't necessarily going to like, the bad ones use it as a cover for incompetence. The fact that you're more concerned about the truth is why you'll never be on the take like them. :-)
- maxxxxx 9y ago
  Funny, you say that. Today I got feedback from someone that my bullshitting skills are not up to snuff and that I still have the naive idea that actual results count in the end :-)
  - R_haterade 9y ago
    Old saying: "Life is hard, even harder if you're stupid." We were too stupid to catch on that everybody else is lying.
throwaway7645 9y ago
I recommend you read Dilbert more often.

wmccullough 9y ago

I'm happy to be harsh because I've had years and years of experience dealing with IBM. Their tools are trash for the cost they want. The majority of their offerings are overengineered and prone to failure in a production setting. They are pros at selling to non-technical management, all the while IT employees get stuck dealing with the aftermath. We ended up getting stuck with the IBM version of work item management, called Jazz Team Concert. From the "source control" to the actual setup and configuration, the product was a nightmare. The worst part was when we looked at license renewal. They wanted three quarters of a million dollars for something that was essentially dog shit wrapped in cat shit. In case you thought I might be on the fence with IBM, I'll add one final clarifying point: Fuck IBM.

nthcolumn 9y ago
Hey Willie I'm feeling some negative customer feedback here.
emmelaich 9y ago
Yeah, IBM (and Oracle, and SAP and ...) have always been like this. My own anecdote -- we had a need for a GIS/charting/mapping system. IBM responded to the RFP as did many others. IBM proposed an entire office automation system with a minor charting system hanging off the side somewhere. Most of the components were unfamiliar to everyone. Though maybe there was Wordperfect or Lotus Notes in there. I remember meetings with IBM always had whole bunch of shiny suits whereas more focussed proposals just had one or two people visit. After one or two rounds of pointless meetings our fairly technical director told them to go fuck off and never come back.
filereaper 9y ago
Hey man, you're not alone, even internal teams at IBM using Jazz Team Concert have been calling it "dog shit wrapped in cat shit" for years now. Don't be so harsh on all of IBM, its like hundreds of companies under one banner. Not all of them have the power to influence other products and often times end up stuck with it and cannot move on to other tools (i.e git). More often than not, customers have higher priority on bugs than other teams dog-fooding the product. Its insane.

R_haterade 9y ago

I recently sat through a sales pitch for a piece of IBM software that has an intensely focused (and better) competitor. IBM's sales pitch was that 1) this particular piece of software was "central to IBM's [market niche] strategy", and 2) if we didn't go with IBM's product, we would miss out on all the interoperability with IBM's Watson that the future is going to bring. The tone veered toward fire-and-brimstone. I wasn't sold, I was put off. They've demoed other things in the past that I've had my socks knocked off by, but they're nothing that's the sort of "indistinguishable from magic" that they're promising in all the marketing hype. The thing is, IBM delivers tremendous value, and they have some fantastic products. However, stunts like that leave people like me with a very sour taste in my mouth. If they'd just focus on delivering a better product, as quantified by hard metrics, (which they could easily afford to do), they'd keep making out like bandits for a very long time. There's tremendous good-will toward them in the market: bad experience aside, I'm still favorably disposed toward them.

heracles 9y ago
May I ask whom the competitor was/is? We are closing on the IBM bandwagon, but I want to show that there is alternatives.
- R_haterade 9y ago
  It could out me. I'd like to hang on to my job, and we're not allowed to be critical of IBM.
  - ohquu 9y ago
    It's IBM, isn't it?
  - heracles 9y ago
    I'm upvoting you doing The Right Thing, but I'd like to downvote the reality instead:/

blueyes 9y ago

The only machine working over at Watson is the PR machine. It's astonishing how much IBM has spent to achieve so little. Per the Jefferies report, IBM spent $15 billion in Cognitive from 2010 to 2015, not including an additional $5 billion in data acquisitions. Even if Cognitive weren't a marketing buzzword invented by IBM to describe if-then statements, that would still be deeply embarrassing. (You could probably double the number of startups funded in Silicon Valley in a year with $20 billion dollars, and I'll bet you'd get much higher returns.) When you look at the main open-source AI frameworks, none of them were created by IBM, because IBM was incapable of building them. There are individual startups that have done more in AI, using far fewer resources. And the real shame is that IBM is convincing rubes to buy their cognitive trash, and the rubes are doing it. And when the rubes' bosses realize that the rubes blew the AI budget and the "AI" delivered nothing, those rubes are getting canned. You can get fired for buying IBM. I've seen it. There's a Madoff-like quality to IBM's Watson sales strategy. The more they fail, the wider they circle to depend on dumber and dumber money from abroad. They're going after rural Scandinavia. They're selling to 3rd-tier cities in China. Just imagining targeting a buyer with the sophistication of the mayor of Mobile, Alabama. That's where IBM Watson is selling strong. IBM has been poisoning the well in the AI industry for years, teaching customers to be gun-shy and scared of an important technology, just because they blew their money on a dog to begin with. I don't believe an AI winter will come, but if it did, IBM would be the main culprit. Even if Watson's many mysterious technologies worked, they would still have a lame business model, because most of AI, and the best of AI tooling, is open source. IBM's trying to sell a secret sauce, even as it declines to participate in competitions that would should how Watson stacks up against other tech. Oren Etzioni has been calling them out for years. [1,2,3] Anyone wondering how IBM came to this sorry pass should read Robert Cringely's "The Decline and Fall of IBM." It's a company run by a clueless management class, who probably believe the smoke they're blowing up everyone else's ass. That's the scary part: The C-suite at IBM actually bought that hype about Watson, until they started to see the numbers, and the numbers sucked. That's why they don't break them out in the quarterly earnings reports. IBM is not signing up the Watson partners it thought it would. [0] Watson makes claims to solve everything. But when you dig in with the sales people, the only success story they cite is Memorial Sloan Kettering (MSK). It's suspicious, considering how many other organizations they must have worked with. H&R block is bragging about Watson technology, too, but that's just because they think the marketing gimmick will work for them as well as it's worked for IBM. The real problem in a situation like this is that very few people have an incentive to get the truth out. IBM doesn't want its stock price to dive. And all the customers are mortified that they failed and wasted their money. And they probably had to sign some non-disparagement clause to boot. [0] http://www.cringely.com/2016/09/07/carrie-underwoods-american-idol-success-teaches-us-ibms-watson-failure/ http://www.cringely.com/2016/09/07/carrie-underwoods-america... [1,2,3] https://twitter.com/etzioni/status/654486809825570817 https://twitter.com/etzioni/status/654486809825570817 https://twitter.com/etzioni/status/785639012161630208 https://twitter.com/etzioni/status/785639012161630208 https://twitter.com/etzioni/status/861231962853224448 https://twitter.com/etzioni/status/861231962853224448

raverbashing 9y ago

That was always ibm's business model: convince higher ups to buy it, often in detriment of who uses it

nameless912 9y ago

> beans I'm reminded of the horrors of early-2000s enterprise Java.

cirgue 9y ago

> "magic beans" is harsh IBM sells an image, not a working product, and they deserve some ridicule for it. I have worked with Watson and a decently large IBM consulting team, and 'magic beans' is a diplomatic way of putting it. 'Obfuscatory horse shit' is more accurate.

deleted 9y ago
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davidgerard 9y ago

> It is so frustrating to have to answer questions from the CEO about why we don't solve all our problems with magic beans from IBM's Watson. could be worse, could be magic beans from IBM Blockchain.

nthcolumn 9y ago

'AI is the New Electricity' and people are moaning about Watson being over-hyped? Electricity was real and delivered immediate benefits. AI does not even exist yet! Imagine I could give you a true AI. yay! Unfortunately,it has the IQ of a 9 year old. Do you want to license that at great expense to make key business decisions for your company? All that Jeopardy and chess has become real double-edged now. People don't seem to get how thick-skulled pointy-haired bosses are. We are probably a century away from that. We can do some great inference from big data sets that will help invent cures for diseases and many things but it isn't a panacea. It isn't 'finicky' some applications will lend themselves more than others. I wouldn't worry too much about the IBM talent pool either. And yes okay disclosure ex-bluesuit.

debacle 9y ago

I don't know if magic beans was overharsh considering the degree to which IBM portrays Watson as some sort of universal spanner for all problems.

totalZero 9y ago

"Magic Beans" is accurate. Not sure if you've seen an IBM presentation covering Watson at an investor conference, but it's pretty much entirely hand waving and hocus pocus.

doug1001 9y ago

gives me some solace to know others find themselves in this position. I remember nearly two years ago, i found some Oracle market brochures directed to BI 'solutions'--courtesy of an Oracle sales rep who sat next to CTO on a 12-hour business class flight--on my desk with a stick note from our CTO "please review, then let's chat". As ordered, i diligently read each pretentious little piece of trivia in the pile, then asked him what specific functionality the Oracle stack offered that our open-source stack did not. He said "360 view of the customer", which i had just read about a dozen times.