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I was part of that acquisition. To be fair, Weather Channel was already running Weather Underground into the ground when they acquired it first. IBM just came i

I was part of that acquisition. To be fair, Weather Channel was already running Weather Underground into the ground when they acquired it first. IBM just came in and helped them finished the job. A huge part of it was the incompetence with which IBM pushed us to use Watson modules in our products, which I could see 6 years ago were worse than open source AI options and had no application to Weather Underground's services. They were basically toy projects being advertised as ground-breaking AI. I'm not surprised at all to see Watson finally collapsing under the weight of its vacuous claims.

sandworm101 5y ago
>> They were basically toy projects being advertised as ground-breaking AI. They were media events that lead to powerful media events, which in turn lead to investors pumping money into the stock price. Shareholder value is the only real profit. Watson being on Jeopardy no doubt garnered investment dollars from thousands of wealthy retirees. Those toy projects earned their keep many times over.
- raincom 5y ago
  This is a great insight. Even if execs know $x billions will be wasted on such trendy projects (toy projects to those who know what’s going on), they will still go and spend $x billions. Why? Since it keeps the market cap going up. This positive delta in the market cap is almost 10 times more than $x billions.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    Not for IBM. https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/IBM/ibm/market-cap https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/IBM/ibm/market-cap It is even worse than it looks considering the opportunity cost of not sticking the money in basically risk free and cost free SP500 ETFs. Even Warren Buffett took a huge bath on IBM.
- deebosong 5y ago
  I don't mean to inject cryptocurrency cynicism & NFT skepticism into this discussion about IBM Watson... But as someone who doesn't know the tech, but worked in the media side as a vendor at the tail end making marketing materials for IBM during their "Internet of Things" craze, I couldn't help but feel, as a laymen, so excited at what IoT (and other crazy developments like Watson) could be, because apparently IBM at the time was hitting up a buncha different vendors and just blanketing a certain sector of the marketing industry with jobs. Any colleagues I talked to were on some IBM marketing job or another. Fast forward to about 7 years later, and I still have no clue what IoT is or does, but I sure saw a buncha marketing material flood mainstream media for a minute, with IBM saying it'd be revolutionary! Just makes me think about web3/ crypto/ NFT's, how it's coming down hard with media campaigns, claims, yada yada. Definitely seems about hype & optics, just like IBM in their IoT media carpet bombing era.
  - davidgerard 5y ago
    IBM's Blockchain division was merged into the Watson division, so it's more on-topic than you might have thought. Put all the vapor together!
- KKKKkkkk1 5y ago
  > They were media events that lead to powerful media events, which in turn lead to investors pumping money into the stock price. That can't be the reason. Over the last 5 years, IBM underperformed the S&P 500 by 16%/year.

sandworm101 5y ago

>> They were basically toy projects being advertised as ground-breaking AI. They were media events that lead to powerful media events, which in turn lead to investors pumping money into the stock price. Shareholder value is the only real profit. Watson being on Jeopardy no doubt garnered investment dollars from thousands of wealthy retirees. Those toy projects earned their keep many times over.

raincom 5y ago
This is a great insight. Even if execs know $x billions will be wasted on such trendy projects (toy projects to those who know what’s going on), they will still go and spend $x billions. Why? Since it keeps the market cap going up. This positive delta in the market cap is almost 10 times more than $x billions.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  Not for IBM. https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/IBM/ibm/market-cap https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/IBM/ibm/market-cap It is even worse than it looks considering the opportunity cost of not sticking the money in basically risk free and cost free SP500 ETFs. Even Warren Buffett took a huge bath on IBM.
deebosong 5y ago
I don't mean to inject cryptocurrency cynicism & NFT skepticism into this discussion about IBM Watson... But as someone who doesn't know the tech, but worked in the media side as a vendor at the tail end making marketing materials for IBM during their "Internet of Things" craze, I couldn't help but feel, as a laymen, so excited at what IoT (and other crazy developments like Watson) could be, because apparently IBM at the time was hitting up a buncha different vendors and just blanketing a certain sector of the marketing industry with jobs. Any colleagues I talked to were on some IBM marketing job or another. Fast forward to about 7 years later, and I still have no clue what IoT is or does, but I sure saw a buncha marketing material flood mainstream media for a minute, with IBM saying it'd be revolutionary! Just makes me think about web3/ crypto/ NFT's, how it's coming down hard with media campaigns, claims, yada yada. Definitely seems about hype & optics, just like IBM in their IoT media carpet bombing era.
- davidgerard 5y ago
  IBM's Blockchain division was merged into the Watson division, so it's more on-topic than you might have thought. Put all the vapor together!
KKKKkkkk1 5y ago
> They were media events that lead to powerful media events, which in turn lead to investors pumping money into the stock price. That can't be the reason. Over the last 5 years, IBM underperformed the S&P 500 by 16%/year.