IBM and Investor Patience
April 18, 2018
Why have investors apparently lost patience with IBM?
Many reasons. We suggest that Watson and its smart software hyperbole may be contributing factors. To cite one example:
It appears Watson is like a Barbie doll. Barbie is notorious for her numerous careers and varied skilled set from working on the space shuttle to expert fashionista to a school teacher. Watson has a similar career trajectory, simply inject glitter and pink into its motherboard. Watson has now entered the VR/AR game word, says The Next Web in the article, “IBM And Unity Are Teaming Up To Bring Watson’s AI To VR And AR Games.”
IBM and Unity have teamed up to bring Watson’s AI capabilities to the popular gaming engine. Unity is mostly known for Pokemon Go and Star Trek Bridge Crew, but now developers will be able to download the IBM Watson Unity SDK for free. The IBM Watson Unity SDK gives users free access to Watson’s AI suite. The biggest problem with Unity based games is that other than Pokemon Go and Star Trek Bridge Crew most of them have not broken into the mainstream, but Watson’s AI suite could change that.
The potential Watson’s AI brings to Unity goes beyond basic augmented and virtual reality gaming:
“…practicing surgeon could stay immersed in a surgery simulator by using voice control. It’s an immersion breaker for a user to have to turn and either wait for menu popups or stop what they’re doing and grab a game pad to access menus and change ‘tools’ during an exercise.With Watson on board the same hypothetical surgery simulator would function much more like the real world. The user could simply say “Hand me a sponge” and the game engine could process that command using Watson’s speech processing ability.Watson’s voice recognition, speech-to-text, and image recognition features make for a promising addition to the Unity game engine and will, hopefully, propel VR/AR into the mainstream.”
Will this type of assertion get IBM back in the good graces of stakeholders? Watson might or could deliver better games, but revenue, not marketing, is the measure of success.
No success, no patience.
Whitney Grace, April 18, 2018
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One Response to “IBM and Investor Patience”
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Dude! Awesome stuff. Please keep writing more things like this. I really like the fact you went so in depth on this and really explored the topic as much as you did. I read a lot of blogs but usually, it’s pretty shallow content. Thanks for upping the game here!