Some products with Watson branding are great and industry leading. Others suck. The latter tend to appear in headlines and severely impact the brand they established with Jeopardy and their ads.
I say all this because I'm at a place now where this is happening. Hugh company with a supposedly game changing product that is mediocre (at best). Massive marketing campaign for "Product X" that is 100% buzzwords and 200% BS. After constant missed revenue targets and product disappointments internally and externally, company is clearly pivoting (but not saying so) to rolling everything under "Brand X."
This is from my (simple developer) perspective. Not sure how it looked in sales, among executives, etc. But that was very weird environment.
I had great Manager who asked me to learn react and take courses in react (mind you it was two years back!) As we "might want to do something in react in the future". So I basically spent my last six months there learning React, aka preparing to the job interviews... they even got us paid courses and all. I mean... IBM.
And once they fired me (these were lay-offs, thousands affected, many of them just hired in past year, like myself) I was paid severance pay too. I went there worked a year, last 6 months was learning for job interviews... fantastic pay too. IBM is crazy.
Spoiler: (s)he learned React.
I think big companies trying to do things like "Capture a market segment that will be a trillion (I made this number up) dollars in 2025" suffer terrible analysis paralysis. The 5 year plan has an extreme revenue ramp up and insane targets. If you combine that with politics, there is a lot of business and financial justification that has to go into every decision, and many decisions will be safe ones that look innovative (we're going to build on Insert Latest Cloud and use AI!) but have no real value to many customers.
The end result is crazy hiring (and firing a few years later) and groups with opposite experiences. Some groups have no work to do and other groups are working 80 hour weeks trying to make it seem like the marketing and growth curves are all true.
It's a comedy (if you are able to stay out of the mess and politics) or a tragedy if you have a manager who feels they want to be the shining star that supports this mad rush.
This all rolls down a few levels of mgmt to the first line guys, who are told your in a growth area, and we expect to need to hire X people over the next 24 months, who will be tasked with XYZ (frequently fancy words which when analyzed boils down to support the product we are going to sell).
This goes on for a couple years until the projected vs real revenue divergence is so large that even an CEO can't ignore the lack of growth. At which point the plug gets pulled and the next adventure starts somewhere else.
Sadly though, IMHO none of that is a problem, the real problem is that the CEO's can't actually tell or make strategic decisions about why these projects are failing to have exponential growth. (see intel & mobile chips/wireless connectivity, those are so strategically necessary for their growth that they need to keep trying until they die). So, they ax them, sometimes just as they are getting a solid product portfolio together. But they don't know that because they have been fed the same line for the past 24-36 months.
The ads are filled with lofty buzzwords. No talk of actual technology at all, because the ads are targetted at non-technical management, the kinds of people who might be euphemistically called "decision-makers". The ads make all kinds of promises to these "decision-makers" about how their business will be utterly transformed. Actual implementation of the systems and business-critical changes is left to the IT department. The non-technical management writes a cheque and then washes their hands of the problem.
Sounds like it was working perfectly!
I'm not even at an IBM shop and the Watson sales pitches are starting to reach C-level folks.