Ok, here's the deal
Let's stop helping IBM by publishing their press-releases
Watson means nothing. They have some APIs and that's it
Others players have a better product.
I'm not one to help IBM advertise for free
Let's stop helping IBM by publishing their press-releases
Watson means nothing. They have some APIs and that's it
Others players have a better product.
I'm not one to help IBM advertise for free
1) everyone at IBM has been told to pretend they are this huge, leading "cloud" company
2) 1) is a clear falsehood
And so you see marketing struggle to come up with all these ridiculous "case studies", because it's difficult if you have to invent them out of thin air instead of real customers.
What IBM is, realistically, is a ridiculously large (and I actually mean ridiculous in the sense of 'how are they not under more anti-trust investigations because they seriously own roughly everything") company with an unbelievably large number of very vert wealthy clients who are scared beyond reason of losing their market share if they don't start using <Insert "new" technology here> so internally everything that happens and looks like a publicity stunt is usually met with a response of "Well no shit we could do that. Why the hell didn't our marketing team point out that we had that capability in the 90's when it would have been impressive"
A lot of the Watson hype seems to actually be because a lot of the companies who traditionally would say 'hm, I dunno about this whole analytics thing. Shouldnt we just stick to spreadsheets and man hours' now have a named thing they can buy that really just covers up that they are actually just investing in a platform with some hadoop clustering and some racks full of P8s (obviously theres a little more to it than that).
The fact that watson can do seemingly cool stuff is actually just a nice way of saying 'anyone can do cool stuff if they invest a bit of cash in technologies that have been around for ages but large companies now have a small window where they can start investing in these technologies and they even get to act like they are an early adopter, of course sans-risk'
I find it amusing that our sales pitch to a rugby team in australia to sell them analytics tools and services failed about 4 years ago, so we gave it to them for free then said we would tell them who the next 10 players to get injured would be and how they would be injured. After the predictions were exactly correct at about injury 6 they were suddenly very interested in buying the stuff. Interestingly, if we sold the same thing now it wouldn't be an analytics platform, we would probably use watson (read: not rebuild that thing, just use the existing stuff because its easier) and it would be marketed as a "watson solution".
It's a great brand, it has potential. The problem is that a) it's being overhyped and b) yet again IBM doesn't understand that if you want it to be used for truly mind-blowing stuff, you have to make it easy for developers to use (or maybe they do, but suck at making it easy to use, see [1]). Then it generates its own, real hype.
For an example of this, I'd say MQ vs MQTT/RabbitMQ, DB2 vs Postgres et al., NoSQL, analytics, Bluemix vs Amazon/GCE/Heroku, Softlayer vs Amazon/Google/Azure. I get that selling to traditional, conservative, and very rich/big firms is a viable strategy - but one that's failing for e.g. Bluemix, Softlayer.
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[1] The Google search results for "Watson API" suck. The documentation sounds like it was written for managers (" Representational State Transfer (REST) Application Programming Interface (API) "). Stop getting me to use Bluemix, Amazon/GCE/Heroku work better. Just look at this mess: https://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developerc...