IBM Chides Google with Faint Praise
December 11, 2008
IBM figured in a Forbes Magazine story called “Metadata: Speaking of IBM” by Bruce Upbin here. The premise of the story is run of the mill IBM public relations. IBM spends money–about $6 billion–on research and development. Much of that research is focused on big, new ideas what wizards call blue sky or fundamental research. But what caught my attention was this passage from Mr. Upbin’s write up:
While Google scales back its beloved plan to let all employees tinker on side projects with 20% of their time, IBM will continue to commit one-third of its research to what its head of worldwide operations, Mark Dean, calls “exploratory” work.That work includes radical ideas like “cognitive computing.” In November, Dharmendra Modha of IBM’s Almaden Research Center in San José, Calif., won a $5 million grant from the Defense Department to lead a group of 10 IBM scientists and seven outside researchers to come up with a brain-like computer that can deal with ambiguity, continuously learn and make split-second decisions based on constantly changing data.
When I read this, I thought, “Hmmm. I wonder if the love fest between Google and IBM is winding down. Google, not IBM, is perceived as the innovation breeder reactor, not IBM. Furthermore, Google hired super wizard Ramanathan Guha from IBM Almaden. In short order, Dr. Guha invented five methods related to the programmable search engine published by the USPTO on the same day in February 2007. For me, the implication in the quoted snippet from Mr. McMillan’s article is that Google has to trim its expenditures and IBM doesn’t. Furthermore, IBM is working on a smart system, not Google. I will be watching to see if my monitoring systems sniff the pheromones of IBM’s executives as IBM tries to regain innovation mindshare.
Stephen Arnold, December 11, 2008
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