IBM and Layoffs: Watson, Watson, Where Are You?
February 4, 2015
For months I have been commenting about the increasingly weird marketing pitches for IBM Watson. This is the Lucene and home grown script system positioned as the next big thing in information retrieval. The financial goals for this system were crazy. My recollection is that IBM wanted to generate a billion in revenue from open source search and bits and pieces of the IBM technology lumber.
Impossible. Having a system ingest bounded content and then answer “questions” about that content is neither new, remarkable, or particularly interesting to me. When the system is presented as a way to solve the problem of cancer and generate barbeque sauce with tamarind, the silliness points to desperation.
IBM marketers were trying everything to make open source search into a billion dollar baby and pull of the stunt quickly. Keep in mind that Autonomy required 15 years and a number of pretty savvy acquisitions to nose into the $700 million range.
IBM, in its confused state, believed that it could do the trick in a fraction of the time. IBM apparently was unaware of the erratic thinking at Hewlett Packard that spent $11 billion for Autonomy and wanted to generate billions from that system at the same time IBM was going to collect a billion or more from the same market.
Both of these companies, dazed by a long term struggle with spreadsheet fever, were ignoring or simply did not understand the doldrums of the enterprise information access market. Big companies were quite happy to give open source solutions a try. Vendors of proprietary systems were pitching their keyword systems as everything from customer support “solutions” to business intelligence systems that would “predict” what the company should know.
Yep, right.
I read with some sadness the posts at Alliance@IBM. The viewpoint is not that of IBM management which is now firing or resource allocating its way people. I am not sure how many folks are going to be terminated, but the comments in this series of IBM employee comments suggest that the staff are unhappy. Some may not go gentle into that good night.
The point is that the underlying problems at IBM were evident in the silly Watson marketing. An organization that can with a straight face suggest that a next generation information access system can discover a new recipe provides a glimpse into an organization’s disconnect at a fundamental level.
Too bad. The stock buybacks, the sale of manufacturing assets, and the assertions that a mainframe is a mobile platform tells me that IBM stockholders may want to reevaluate those holdings.
If IBM asked Watson, I question the outputs.
Stephen E Arnold, February 4, 2015
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4 Responses to “IBM and Layoffs: Watson, Watson, Where Are You?”
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This is the Lucene and home grown script system positioned as the next big thing in information retrieval.
Isn’t it a lot of overstatement?
You mean UIMA which IBM moved to Apache a few years ago. Agree the business side is a mess but the execs and financial firms are steering it that way.
Except UIMA, IBM Watson uses Indri, Prolog, state of the art parsers and tools for knowledge extraction. So, I am not sure what the author means by “home grown scripts” here. I think he should clarify at the very least.
I personally tend to think that the IBM’s text analytics toolset is likely to be quite good. Whether it is enough to earn 1B, is quite a different questions. However, I note that there is a growing need for advanced text processing and this need cannot be fulfilled by Google.
PS: and Lucence, of course.