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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

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 somewhat his idea). A few months later, an IBM marketing team called HIS CELL and asked for ME. Imagine how it felt to have the CEO walk up to me, deadpan hand me his personal iphone and say "It's for you.".. 2) They told me they'd help me with the support data idea, and every meeting we set up they tried to pitch "what if we put Watson on all of your customer's storefronts, we could add a 'powered by watson' banner on every page, and you give us a cut of GMV?". I pivoted them to our plugin framework and told them to build it themselves. 3) To demo the technology, the first step was to buy a $250k server from IBM. To demo it. Big LOLs all around, never trust big blue.

WrtCdEvrydy 5y ago
> 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.
- throwaheyy 5y ago
  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 and consulting contracts, feeding parasitically and gradually becoming more and more entangled. One spectacular example, 7M budget but in actuality, 1.2B down the drain and nothing to show for it https://blog.beyondsoftware.com/the-queensland-health-payroll-fiasco https://blog.beyondsoftware.com/the-queensland-health-payrol...
  - pram 5y ago
    Oh yeah I worked on a similar project at Oracle. The sales people basically sold the state on a 'stack' with a bunch of random horseshit that was magically supposed to work together and then dumped it on engineering. I mean that in a totally serious way, sales seemingly just grabbed a bunch of names of Oracle software and mashed it together. It literally never worked at any point. Then Oracle sued THEM about it, lmao. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cover_Oregon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cover_Oregon
    - selimthegrim 5y ago
      I met one of the "managers" on that who told me with a straight face "All you need is a college degree in anything to manage developers" (hers was in English IIRC)
  - fphhotchips 5y ago
    > Pursuing such an approach is highly revealing because if the technology actually worked, that approach would not be necessary. This is, sadly, untrue. Enterprise reps do this because on the whole, it doesn't matter if you have the best technology - if the other guy is successful at the CxO level, the customer will go their way.
    - throwaheyy 5y ago
      Correct - not saying that the best technology assures success, but that without working tech, marketing to the CxO level is the sole viable option.
  - spikej 5y ago
    Add this one to the list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_pay_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_pay_system
  - bambataa 5y ago
    > 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.
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  Marketers have no sense of boundaries or limits. Everything they do is in violation of social norms. You give them an email that's clearly for some specific and useful purpose, they abuse it by turning it into their personal marketing channel which benefits nobody but them.
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  Also, C suite phone numbers are worth their weight in gold for sales teams. Confusing that with another person’s number is a pretty bad mistake.
stathibus 5y ago
IBM is famous for charging people for the privilege of talking to them, even if you're trying to sell them something. This strategy makes sense if you consider that even in it's heyday Watson was 95% data science consulting firm and 5% actual valuable technology. I really think Watson is one of the biggest tech marketing bamboozles of the 21st century. Through Jeopardy they really had a segment of the business world and the general public convinced that they had cracked AI, but behind the scenes it was all one-off custom solutions under one trademark.
- teawrecks 5y ago
  To be fair, paying them for the privilege to sell them something makes more sense than the inverse.
- qaq 5y ago
  Kindah like Palantir
  - dr_dshiv 5y ago
    Can you expand?
    - NicoJuicy 5y ago
      Many people think palantir cracked AI. While they are just using tensorflow and other things like anyone else. Additionally, large tech can't apply for defense contracts because of internal ethical concerns of employees. So the naritive remains.
      - chelical 5y ago
        Who thinks that? I've never heard this. People thought Watson was a lot more capable than it actually was just because of the Jeopardy PR stunt. People outside tech were buzzing about IBM and Watson. In my experience, people outside tech barely know Palantir exists.
lvl100 5y ago
This reminded me of my experience with them a few years back with MQTT. They were pushing their Bluemix/cloud hard and I just wanted to test it out. Never again.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
Everything about this sounds like they hired inexperienced sales people and promised them huge payouts if they could close certain deals. The kinds of sales people who won’t hesitate to burn a lot of customer relationships to the ground as long as they could close a few big deals for themselves.
- tekstar 5y ago
  That's what it felt like, yeah. Also that the tech wasn't able to prove itself so they kept it behind a curtain. Multiple times they'd book a technical meeting to get us on-boarded and when I got on the call it was all sales people trying.
mrtksn 5y ago
The company I worked for used some Oracle tech and I was trying to get some high level information about a product but their website kept requesting my e-mail just to show me some documentation. Once I provided them with my e-mail, I started receiving "You must take us to your leader" messages in a tone as if I was their employee and they were commanding me to take them to my CEO. I can't imagine myself chasing the CEO in the building because some sales people in Oracle told me to do so :) To be fair, after being in meetings with theirs sales engineers(who wore the best shirts I've ever seen) a few times I grew to respect their stubbornness and the way they structured their corporate machine. It's a valuable lesson to have an exposure to corporate dealings I believe, before that I used to do freelance stuff and had no idea how a simple webpage can cost millions and why a large corporation won't buy that easily from a small company with similar or better product at the fraction of the cost.
- blastonico 5y ago
  > You must take us to your leader. LOL, it sounds like General Zod in Superman II (1981). You should have asked if they want you to kneel before them as well.
  - mrtksn 5y ago
    It was both funny and scary as if I was reached by demanding aliens who were watching me :) I didn't know what to do, so I simply start marking it as spam and moved on. I guess they had a sales pitch based on the stuff I looked at.
- aenis 5y ago
  Funny, similar thing happened to me. IBM along a few other behemots pitched for a serious project at a company I worked for as enterprise arch. All companies brought their top salespeople, and all tried nasty things, but IBM was by far the worst. Their top guy started their pitch by saying he chatted with our CEO over the christmas holidays. He mentioned - and I am not making this up - that he should be talking to people higher in the org. (The most junior person in the room was me, the rest were board-2/-3s). It soon emerged their thing could not work, and I killed it in the first round of pitching. What followed was my bosses' boss, the CIO of a very large company, called me and gave me an earfull since he himself has to explain to CEO why we had the audacity to not choose IBM. I'd not touch anything IBM ever. Bunch of assholes.
lifewallet_dev 5y ago
Wow, I can't believe how accurate this story is, same thing happened to me I think summer 2016 but I thought it was because our execs were idiots not that IBM would treat every company like that... CTO calling me to his office to talk to IBM on their personal phone, he was the only one who wanted Watson (this was a healthcare company, I was VP of Eng). And yes, they were obsessed with putting their logo everywhere, and as soon as we heard it was so expensive, we had to tell our CTO to chill, we stopped, cause you know you can hire at least 2 devs for that money.
- tekstar 5y ago
  Wow, up until now I attributed it to incompetence when really it was a sales tactic. Wild. Thanks for corroborating.
rubyfan 5y ago
In my experience this seems to be a theme with very senior executives - they are very often interested in snake oil and can’t seem to discern snake oil from real medicine.
Traster 5y ago
>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 somewhat his idea). A few months later, an IBM marketing team called HIS CELL and asked for ME. Imagine how it felt to have the CEO walk up to me, deadpan hand me his personal iphone and say "It's for you.".. This sounds like the biggest power move you could ever pull.
pettycashstash2 5y ago
It used to be you can't get fired for hiring big blue. In the end it was always a lot of sales /pre sales folks, and a lot of substandard subcontractors milking the golden cow. I don't miss managing their implementations/deliveries at all.
vvram 5y ago
This is not an IBM thing only, this is fate of most companies that did not transition from sales led
Abishek_Muthian 5y ago
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 telling the VP that I was just exploring what their product was, The VP told me he was ready to fly in to my office the same week to 'talk further'. It was weird to end that conversation with them and my client had a good laugh when I shared the experience. I don't get why IBM finds it hard to deal with Startups, All other behemoths (MS/Amazon/Google etc.) have successfully created products for Startups often by offering generous freebies and 'Pay as you go' plans . Where as IBM still thinks they can slap Fortune 500 pricing on entry-level startups. I guess as long as those Fortune 500 companies & even Govt. fall for that Watson type products, They don't have a reason to change.
- smackeyacky 5y ago
  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.
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    Startups are more likely to see through the bullshit. It's similar to why spam emails often have intentional spelling mistakes - to get the marks to self-select.

WrtCdEvrydy 5y ago

> 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.

throwaheyy 5y ago
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 and consulting contracts, feeding parasitically and gradually becoming more and more entangled. One spectacular example, 7M budget but in actuality, 1.2B down the drain and nothing to show for it https://blog.beyondsoftware.com/the-queensland-health-payroll-fiasco https://blog.beyondsoftware.com/the-queensland-health-payrol...
- pram 5y ago
  Oh yeah I worked on a similar project at Oracle. The sales people basically sold the state on a 'stack' with a bunch of random horseshit that was magically supposed to work together and then dumped it on engineering. I mean that in a totally serious way, sales seemingly just grabbed a bunch of names of Oracle software and mashed it together. It literally never worked at any point. Then Oracle sued THEM about it, lmao. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cover_Oregon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cover_Oregon
  - selimthegrim 5y ago
    I met one of the "managers" on that who told me with a straight face "All you need is a college degree in anything to manage developers" (hers was in English IIRC)
- fphhotchips 5y ago
  > Pursuing such an approach is highly revealing because if the technology actually worked, that approach would not be necessary. This is, sadly, untrue. Enterprise reps do this because on the whole, it doesn't matter if you have the best technology - if the other guy is successful at the CxO level, the customer will go their way.
  - throwaheyy 5y ago
    Correct - not saying that the best technology assures success, but that without working tech, marketing to the CxO level is the sole viable option.
- spikej 5y ago
  Add this one to the list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_pay_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_pay_system
- bambataa 5y ago
  > 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.
matheusmoreira 5y ago
Marketers have no sense of boundaries or limits. Everything they do is in violation of social norms. You give them an email that's clearly for some specific and useful purpose, they abuse it by turning it into their personal marketing channel which benefits nobody but them.
ashtonkem 5y ago
Also, C suite phone numbers are worth their weight in gold for sales teams. Confusing that with another person’s number is a pretty bad mistake.

stathibus 5y ago

IBM is famous for charging people for the privilege of talking to them, even if you're trying to sell them something. This strategy makes sense if you consider that even in it's heyday Watson was 95% data science consulting firm and 5% actual valuable technology. I really think Watson is one of the biggest tech marketing bamboozles of the 21st century. Through Jeopardy they really had a segment of the business world and the general public convinced that they had cracked AI, but behind the scenes it was all one-off custom solutions under one trademark.

teawrecks 5y ago
To be fair, paying them for the privilege to sell them something makes more sense than the inverse.
qaq 5y ago
Kindah like Palantir
- dr_dshiv 5y ago
  Can you expand?
  - NicoJuicy 5y ago
    Many people think palantir cracked AI. While they are just using tensorflow and other things like anyone else. Additionally, large tech can't apply for defense contracts because of internal ethical concerns of employees. So the naritive remains.
    - chelical 5y ago
      Who thinks that? I've never heard this. People thought Watson was a lot more capable than it actually was just because of the Jeopardy PR stunt. People outside tech were buzzing about IBM and Watson. In my experience, people outside tech barely know Palantir exists.

lvl100 5y ago

This reminded me of my experience with them a few years back with MQTT. They were pushing their Bluemix/cloud hard and I just wanted to test it out. Never again.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

Everything about this sounds like they hired inexperienced sales people and promised them huge payouts if they could close certain deals. The kinds of sales people who won’t hesitate to burn a lot of customer relationships to the ground as long as they could close a few big deals for themselves.

tekstar 5y ago
That's what it felt like, yeah. Also that the tech wasn't able to prove itself so they kept it behind a curtain. Multiple times they'd book a technical meeting to get us on-boarded and when I got on the call it was all sales people trying.

mrtksn 5y ago

The company I worked for used some Oracle tech and I was trying to get some high level information about a product but their website kept requesting my e-mail just to show me some documentation. Once I provided them with my e-mail, I started receiving "You must take us to your leader" messages in a tone as if I was their employee and they were commanding me to take them to my CEO. I can't imagine myself chasing the CEO in the building because some sales people in Oracle told me to do so :) To be fair, after being in meetings with theirs sales engineers(who wore the best shirts I've ever seen) a few times I grew to respect their stubbornness and the way they structured their corporate machine. It's a valuable lesson to have an exposure to corporate dealings I believe, before that I used to do freelance stuff and had no idea how a simple webpage can cost millions and why a large corporation won't buy that easily from a small company with similar or better product at the fraction of the cost.

blastonico 5y ago
> You must take us to your leader. LOL, it sounds like General Zod in Superman II (1981). You should have asked if they want you to kneel before them as well.
- mrtksn 5y ago
  It was both funny and scary as if I was reached by demanding aliens who were watching me :) I didn't know what to do, so I simply start marking it as spam and moved on. I guess they had a sales pitch based on the stuff I looked at.
aenis 5y ago
Funny, similar thing happened to me. IBM along a few other behemots pitched for a serious project at a company I worked for as enterprise arch. All companies brought their top salespeople, and all tried nasty things, but IBM was by far the worst. Their top guy started their pitch by saying he chatted with our CEO over the christmas holidays. He mentioned - and I am not making this up - that he should be talking to people higher in the org. (The most junior person in the room was me, the rest were board-2/-3s). It soon emerged their thing could not work, and I killed it in the first round of pitching. What followed was my bosses' boss, the CIO of a very large company, called me and gave me an earfull since he himself has to explain to CEO why we had the audacity to not choose IBM. I'd not touch anything IBM ever. Bunch of assholes.

lifewallet_dev 5y ago

Wow, I can't believe how accurate this story is, same thing happened to me I think summer 2016 but I thought it was because our execs were idiots not that IBM would treat every company like that... CTO calling me to his office to talk to IBM on their personal phone, he was the only one who wanted Watson (this was a healthcare company, I was VP of Eng). And yes, they were obsessed with putting their logo everywhere, and as soon as we heard it was so expensive, we had to tell our CTO to chill, we stopped, cause you know you can hire at least 2 devs for that money.

tekstar 5y ago
Wow, up until now I attributed it to incompetence when really it was a sales tactic. Wild. Thanks for corroborating.

rubyfan 5y ago

In my experience this seems to be a theme with very senior executives - they are very often interested in snake oil and can’t seem to discern snake oil from real medicine.

Traster 5y ago

>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 somewhat his idea). A few months later, an IBM marketing team called HIS CELL and asked for ME. Imagine how it felt to have the CEO walk up to me, deadpan hand me his personal iphone and say "It's for you.".. This sounds like the biggest power move you could ever pull.

pettycashstash2 5y ago

It used to be you can't get fired for hiring big blue. In the end it was always a lot of sales /pre sales folks, and a lot of substandard subcontractors milking the golden cow. I don't miss managing their implementations/deliveries at all.

vvram 5y ago

This is not an IBM thing only, this is fate of most companies that did not transition from sales led

Abishek_Muthian 5y ago

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 telling the VP that I was just exploring what their product was, The VP told me he was ready to fly in to my office the same week to 'talk further'. It was weird to end that conversation with them and my client had a good laugh when I shared the experience. I don't get why IBM finds it hard to deal with Startups, All other behemoths (MS/Amazon/Google etc.) have successfully created products for Startups often by offering generous freebies and 'Pay as you go' plans . Where as IBM still thinks they can slap Fortune 500 pricing on entry-level startups. I guess as long as those Fortune 500 companies & even Govt. fall for that Watson type products, They don't have a reason to change.

smackeyacky 5y ago
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.
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  Startups are more likely to see through the bullshit. It's similar to why spam emails often have intentional spelling mistakes - to get the marks to self-select.