As someone who works for IBM I'd have to disagree with you there. No one has ever told me we are a huge cloud company, I mean obviously I've been told we're investing buckets of money in cloud technologies and that we have made it a key strategy point to focus on growth in the area, but not once has anyone even intimated that we 'are [a] huge cloud company'.

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".