IBM and Its Five Year Vision: Nothing Like Vision Instead of Revenue

January 9, 2017

I read “IBM’s 5 Year Vision Focuses on New Technology for Visualizing the World.” The author is a Kevin Murnane who is the author of Nutrition for Cyclists: Eating and Drinking Before, During and After the Ride. Seems like excellent preparation for the low fat approach to IBM technology, doesn’t it?

The write up in the capitalist tool Forbes Magazine recycles information from “IBM 5 in 5. Five Innovations That Will Help Change Our Lives within Five Years: The Invisible Made Visible.” Now that’s a title designed for Web search engines.

The IBM write up identifies these technologies as life changers:

Artificial intelligence like IBM Watson
Superhero vision via “hyperimaging”
Macroscopes
Medical labs on a chip
Smart sensors.

What I found interesting was this comment from the nutritionist:

People would be wise to listen when IBM talks about future technology. Their past achievements include the invention of floppy discs and hard drives, the relational database and SQL, Fortran, DRAM, the virtual machine, the ATM machine, magnetic stripe cards and the Universal Bar Code. Their employees have won five Nobel Prizes, six Turing Awards, ten National Medals of Technology, and five National Medals of Science. IBM has a long history of looking forward, thinking big and accomplishing what they set out to do. If their future is like their past, IBM’s 5 in 5 will be more than pie in the sky.

Unfortunately the Nobel Prizes, the Turing Awards, the National Medals for Technology and the five National Medals of Science are not translating to top line revenue growth and juicy profits for stakeholders. IBM’s vision does not include expanding aggressively the i2-type technology at a time when IBM Federal Systems might be in for a a bit of Gotham shock.

Give me that old fashioned revenue growth, please. I am not sure that macroscopes and superhero vision can change how I see the company’s last fifteen quarterly reports. One does not get fit on a low calorie revenue diet, does one?

Stephen E Arnold, January 9, 2017

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under IBM Watson, Marketing, News

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.