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Comment by tekstar | Hacker News Reader

I worked for a large e-commerce company. I wanted to investigate putting all our support data into Watson and see what sort of recommendations it could provide, maybe a sort of auto-suggestion to help our customers. Three really funny points stand out from the experience:

1) To apply for Watson access you needed to show C-level approval, so our CEO put his name and phone number on the application (trying Watson was somewhat his idea). A few months later, an IBM marketing team called HIS CELL and asked for ME. Imagine how it felt to have the CEO walk up to me, deadpan hand me his personal iphone and say "It's for you."..

2) They told me they'd help me with the support data idea, and every meeting we set up they tried to pitch "what if we put Watson on all of your customer's storefronts, we could add a 'powered by watson' banner on every page, and you give us a cut of GMV?". I pivoted them to our plugin framework and told them to build it themselves.

3) To demo the technology, the first step was to buy a $250k server from IBM. To demo it.

Big LOLs all around, never trust big blue.

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IBM is famous for charging people for the privilege of talking to them, even if you're trying to sell them something.

This strategy makes sense if you consider that even in it's heyday Watson was 95% data science consulting firm and 5% actual valuable technology.

I really think Watson is one of the biggest tech marketing bamboozles of the 21st century. Through Jeopardy they really had a segment of the business world and the general public convinced that they had cracked AI, but behind the scenes it was all one-off custom solutions under one trademark.

To be fair, paying them for the privilege to sell them something makes more sense than the inverse.

Kindah like Palantir

Can you expand?

Many people think palantir cracked AI.

While they are just using tensorflow and other things like anyone else.

Additionally, large tech can't apply for defense contracts because of internal ethical concerns of employees. So the naritive remains.

Who thinks that? I've never heard this. People thought Watson was a lot more capable than it actually was just because of the Jeopardy PR stunt. People outside tech were buzzing about IBM and Watson. In my experience, people outside tech barely know Palantir exists.

A lot of retailers buying their stocks and blindly following people like Cathy Woods and random YouTubers.

Not me, but i see some guys trying to spread that naritive.

"Just using tensorflow" is reductive. TF is a design tool, what matters is what you build with it.

Sure.

But having 'cracked AI' means you are the innovator. Not just using the tools ( eg. Compare that with Google & AlphaGo ).

We're not talking about the same things.

It’s promoted as a complete system, but you end up paying them to build out the system to do whatever you wanted to do.

Right, AI is just custom software, with people in the back to deal with edge cases?

It's IF statements all the way down, baby.

IF (intelligence.getAnswer("What is the meaning of life?")) {...}

IBM, Oracle, Panatir....in a lot of cases these are pro services companies that custom build whatever is needed. LOTS of money in enterprise application development.

Oracle is a expensive and "popular" database, IBM does many things ( eg. Quantum computers, ... )

Palantir is a consultancy body shop with a dashboard product and a probably good pipeline for merging data. ( Reference - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11646587 )

Pure consultancy is rated much lower ( eg. Thoughtworks if you want a reference)

Consultancy + adaptable software is a decent business model. Unfortunately "adaptable software" for {insert industry} is a really hard target to architect right.

Especially when the majority of your tech headcount bills by the hour and gets paid to tell the customer "Yes."

I didn't say it isn't a decent business model.

In the context of pltr, I'm saying it's not similar as Oracle/ibm and comparison is futile.

Yeah, that is patently untrue.

How so?

That's how it is for just about any non-trivial business system. They're sold as complete systems, but there's still customization required for those systems to actually fit the business - and it's through offering consulting for those customizations that enterprise software vendors make the big bucks.

They are just a contracting company making money off billing the government hourly for their employees time. It’s a horrible business.

Sounds like an awesome business if you're getting the money.

A good deal if you can get it, but probably not the ideal outcome if you’re a citizen paying for it or dealing with systems engineered by them.

Not really assuming they are the prime contractor all the value is in the contracts and those are time limited before being re-competed lose all your contracts and your business value goes to zero because there is no IP like a Google or a Microsoft would have that is at the core of the value of the company.

Ehh...I get why tech people are suspect of Palantir but they're just disrupting other government contractors.

And from my limited experience working with the government, they absolutely need / want / rely on having companies hold their hand as they insist on doing things the hard, slow, and very custom way.

It doesn't take much to disrupt a fax machine.

Doesn’t this apply to most startups though? The core technical problems aren’t “hard” it’s that the industry involve can’t adapt due to inertia of entrenched companies.

Disrupting? Their stock price has dropped by two thirds from its peak. They're probably looking to find a buyer at this point, such as IBM itself, while the leadership uses them as a stock-printing machine to enrich themselves.

Because of Thiel's lack of ethics and his support for the political far right?

The company is like a perfect storm of bad actors from horseshoe theory; The actual day to day CEO of palantir is Marxist theorist.

>Karp has described himself as a socialist and a progressive, and said he voted for Hillary Clinton. In 2017, he was recorded during a Palantir company meeting claiming he turned down an invitation from President Trump, saying “I respect nothing about the dude.”

>He has said that technology companies like Palantir have an obligation to support the U.S. military. He has defended Palantir's contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the controversy over family separations, saying that while separations are "a really tough, complex, jarring moral issue," he favors "a fair but rigorous immigration policy". He has said the U.S. government should have a strong hand in tech regulation and that western countries should dominate AI research.

>Karp founded the London-based money management firm Caedmon Group.

>In 2004, along with Peter Thiel (who had been a classmate at Stanford) and others, he co-founded Palantir as CEO.

>He is described as a wellness fanatic who swims, skis cross country, practices Qigong meditation and martial arts, and keeps Tai Chi swords in his offices.

He'd make for a good Silicon Valley or Black Mirror character.

To be honest, my experience of private enterprise is that they insist on doing things hard, slow and very custom. Almost every problem that exists is distinct enough that you can argue it doesn't fit the existing COTS software. It's sometimes necesary to build something yourself, but no where near as often as it is done.

Some might do it under the belief that it makes them more flexible later on, but going with off the shelf stuff means it's easier to find people to create and migrate to a custom system when or if it's needed.

If I remember correctly, John Ralston Saul made the point [0] that there is little observed difference in terms of the efficiency of decision making between large government and large corporations.

My personal experience is that large organisations and government are barely distinguishable. This is often excused in the name of "risk mitigation" - but in my experience it's really just that there are more snouts in the money trough, and that politics is more important than success. The close ties between government and the largest organisations also invite a similar culture.

The end result for both government and large enterprise is "hard, slow and very custom". (Of course, there are exceptions in both government and enterprise).

[0] http://www.johnralstonsaul.com/non-fiction-books/the-unconsc...

This is been my anecdotal experience.

In the UK, I note that politicians extolling the efficiency of the private sector rarely have any substantial experience in big companies.

They have plenty of experience being wined and dined by executives of big companies though.

I feel like with this comment, the word "disrupting" has officially jumped shark and lost any and all meaning.

Palantir isn't "disrupting" government contractors. It is a government contractor, țhe old-fashioned kind, at that, and nothing more.

And people aren't suspect of Palantir. People dislike Palantir because its government contracts are shady and boring (they're all about efficiently tracking people), but they pretend to be a "saving the world with tech" startup with such enthusiasm you'd think they put the Kool-Aid into the water coolers.

Unsurprisingly, XXI century Stasi trying to look hip to recruit the tech talent give off nothing but "how do you do, fellow kids" kind of vibes.

Disclaimer: interviewed for Palantir. They thought I could be a fit. Must have not been using their own software to vet candidates back then.

If it was just government...

Deep Blue preceded this. They had specialty equipment for crunching chess moves. Really excellent hype machine.

I liked the documentary about it: https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0379296/

I don't see the problem here, that was literally the point. To build a chess computer.

That was the last time IBM was cool.

That and it was cool when Watson won at Jeopardy.

I think maybe the common problem is that there’s a hidden and false assumption that being good in one domain will transfer elsewhere, it doesn’t and didn’t

I think the above poster's point was that they think Watson's point was to build a Jeopardy machine (and hype).

The Jeopardy thing was pretty brilliant in a sense - wrangling an episode of free advertising from one of the most popular game shows. A memorable episode at that!

Was Deep Blue/Watson basically the starting point of AI/ML, or had that already been happening earlier or concurrently?

Deep Blue and Watson aren’t the same thing. Deep Blue was a chess computer from the 90s — and it was not the first chess computer, so regardless of whether you consider computer chess to be part of AI, the answer is no.

It's a shame we never got a cross of Deep Blue and Battle Chess. Make those chess masters fight for their lives.

In fact, forget the chessboards.

Just make them chessmasters square it off in the ring.

Chessmaster Deathmatch Season 1 Episode 1: Kasparov vs. Fisher

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_boxing

Deep Blue isn't ML at all, it's just a purpose built system for solving chess. It doesn't learn anything as such and just a fancy brute forcing machine that (smartly) goes through all possible chess moves and selects the best possible tree of outcomes. The work on actual ML happened independently of this.

mehh feels like we are creating fancy ML brute force crunching machines now

Now = last 40 years

That is a form of machine learning. It uses an algorithm with an enormous ability to look ahead, and selects the moves according to a heuristic that have been shown previously to be most likely to create the desired end state.

Chess is not a solved game from the starting state, so it has to make assumptions based on the data it has. This is machine learning. Please don't make such definite statements. You even say it in your own comment "selects the best possible true of outcomes", how do you think it selects this? It uses heuristics to assign values to different board states, and in the case of Deep Blue these values were created through previous game analysis. If a knight to c2 on turn 8 is rarely seen in the same game as a winning board state, then this is valued lower. Looking through the tree wasn't the ML part, but knowing how to pick the best node on the tree was. Deep Blue is ML.

> It uses heuristics to assign values to different board states, and in the case of Deep Blue these values were created through previous game analysis.

Unless I’m misinformed, this part isn’t true. The heuristic was hardcoded with the help of human experts.

From the paper Deep Blue by Murray Campbell et al (people who worked on Deep Blue) "The initialization of the feature values is done by the “evaluation function generator”, a sub-program which was run on the master node of SP system." Which would suggest it generated the heuristic itself. The features may have been hardcoded, but assigning values to them wasn't. In addition to this, feature values could be static or dynamic, meaning it would update dynamic ones depending on the board state. It not only generated the heuristic values (feature values) it could modify them to reflect their relative change in impact throughout the game.

AI/ML has somewhat continuous research going all the way back to the First AI/ML Boom of the 1960s and the Second AI/ML Boom era of the "Lisp Machines" [1] in the 1980s. Depending on who you ask the current AI/ML Boom is something like third or fourth wave, and yeah some of that depends on where you fit Deep Blue and/or Watson in the timelines (or even if you bother at all to count them, given all the other comments here on how Deep Blue/Watson have always been PR maneuvers more strongly than technical lines in the sand).

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine

Alternatively, there's a great Deep Blue documentary by Fredrik Knudsen on YouTube

https://youtu.be/HwF229U2ba8

Watson is one the greatest marketing achievements of the 21st century.

It’s literally consulting with open source software. But they packaged it up in an attractive format that got them buzz. Imagine what that marketing team could do for a product that was able to half work!!!

>> even in it's heyday Watson was 95% data science consulting firm and 5% actual valuable technology

So, like a lot of other AI and ML companies out there?

They bamboozled no one who knew anything. Even the "sold off in parts" bit in the OP article title doesn't surprise anyone who knows what "Watson Health" means. It was never a platform just a bunch of disjoint garbage components. You couldn't sell the platform so now they're selling off the tools. Imagine a toolbox with a spade a fork lift and a soldering iron.

> I really think Watson is one of the biggest tech marketing bamboozles of the 21st century.

The weird thing was that to anyone following ML this was detectable bs.

The company I worked for used some Oracle tech and I was trying to get some high level information about a product but their website kept requesting my e-mail just to show me some documentation.

Once I provided them with my e-mail, I started receiving "You must take us to your leader" messages in a tone as if I was their employee and they were commanding me to take them to my CEO. I can't imagine myself chasing the CEO in the building because some sales people in Oracle told me to do so :)

To be fair, after being in meetings with theirs sales engineers(who wore the best shirts I've ever seen) a few times I grew to respect their stubbornness and the way they structured their corporate machine. It's a valuable lesson to have an exposure to corporate dealings I believe, before that I used to do freelance stuff and had no idea how a simple webpage can cost millions and why a large corporation won't buy that easily from a small company with similar or better product at the fraction of the cost.

> You must take us to your leader.

LOL, it sounds like General Zod in Superman II (1981). You should have asked if they want you to kneel before them as well.

It was both funny and scary as if I was reached by demanding aliens who were watching me :)

I didn't know what to do, so I simply start marking it as spam and moved on. I guess they had a sales pitch based on the stuff I looked at.

Funny, similar thing happened to me.

IBM along a few other behemots pitched for a serious project at a company I worked for as enterprise arch. All companies brought their top salespeople, and all tried nasty things, but IBM was by far the worst. Their top guy started their pitch by saying he chatted with our CEO over the christmas holidays. He mentioned - and I am not making this up - that he should be talking to people higher in the org. (The most junior person in the room was me, the rest were board-2/-3s). It soon emerged their thing could not work, and I killed it in the first round of pitching. What followed was my bosses' boss, the CIO of a very large company, called me and gave me an earfull since he himself has to explain to CEO why we had the audacity to not choose IBM.

I'd not touch anything IBM ever. Bunch of assholes.

It's because they want to talk to the most power in the decision but with the least information as to how the problem could be solved without the help of Oracle/IBM/whoever.

This, 100%. Think about it another way: IBM et al. sales only lose by talking to lower-title folks.

Best case, they lose control of the narrative as it's reported up internally, and someone higher up still has to approve it.

Worst case, some engineer who actually knows their shit very quickly outlines why this can never work for the given problem.

Once you're into the VP level, there's (usually) less technical knowledge, because folks at that level have full days crammed with higher-level decisions. So it's more plausible for sales to pitch {insert whatever buzzwordy, batshit crazy idea} and have it fly.

To add on, it's also a standard negotiation tactic for a negotiator to try and speak to the highest-ranking person possible. This tactic was specifically recommended by a guest speaker at a Stanford Business School seminar about how to negotiate uploaded to YouTube (timestamped to 31:59 for the relevant bit). [0]

[0] (Seminar from 2007) https://youtu.be/rCmvMDrCWjs?t=1919

Yep. I used to do technical sales support. I would come in after the sales manager had broken the ice and arranged for some of the customer's technical team to listen to our proposed solution. But the sales training we got told us to always sell at the highest level possible, preferably the person who would sign the purchase order, not lower level technical people.

That didn't always work out. We sold a lot of stuff to Hewlett-Packard and they always forced most of the decisions down to the engineers. They would rarely let us talk to the people who could sign the purchase order. The sales people didn't like it much since they didn't have the control that they were used to. But it was kind of great for all of us technical people because we could sit around with the HP engineers and talk about technical stuff without a lot of sales-speak getting in the way.

But wouldn't a competent VP, C-level just shrug and say 'I want technical approval first from my teams, we don't do favorites here, my time is precious and you're making me lose precious amount of it? I had a business unit manager answer that to such queries that way and it felt like good management... Isn't the whole shtick about management to be able to delegate and trust your org?

"Nobody ever got fired for buying an IBM."

I knew a couple of people who got fired after getting their org sucked into WebSphere. Long time ago but it does happen occasionally.

They were fired because of WebSphere?

The quote I mentioned is just a quote, but it points to a part of a reason. If you are a CEO or a high level executive of a big company, going with IBM or Oracle is a safe bet. It's not very likely you will be blamed for failures of IBM or Oracle. It may be a money hole and bad for business but it's a much safer bet than going with some smaller vendor instead of big name vendors.

The "nobody got fired for buying IBM" thing expired decades ago, that mantle passed on to Microsoft. Last 5 - 10 years, nobody gets fired for architecting dozens of microservices in the cloud.

One would think the decision makers would trust the technical advice of the smart people they've hired instead of the opinion of some obviously lying salesman...

"If they're smart, why are they working for me?"

Yeah except that a lot of - not all - executives maintain something akin to class solidarity with other executives at big companies, especially their big vendors..

Because at some point they might want/need another job, and so often times it's better to help each other out, at the expense of the folks lower down.

Those folks are useless to them, personally, but that VP at Big Vendor probably isn't.

Considering that the buzzword shooting, smooth talking sales rep offering an easy to solution to, well, all of the problems is much closer to how most C-Level guys (in established companies at least) think, I'm not surprised anymore. This till manages to chock me from time to time, so.

Yup - I had the same "your guy is a problem, he's anti-innovation." The brilliant thing was that they rang the CEO of the business unit who was at that time +4 on me and had never met me. He was flummoxed and invited me for lunch to find out how I'd made such a big impression! Did me loads of good!

It sure sounds like IBM were bad. But it sounds like your company was even worse, the way your bosses' boss behaved.

Well, no. In the end they backed my reco and we didnt go IBM. I feel like I did inconvenience my managers though, and indeed left not long afterwards for a better job.

"Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" was the common phrase at our company in the 1990s. At the time, that was certainly true. Which lead to adoption of truly awful tech, token-ring over type-1 cable, versus ethernet over twisted pair.

I was involved in a small project, and we were running low on the money runway for next phase. The IBM sales guy literally barged into a FORTUNE 50 CIOs office, without an appointment, asking for budget to be approved for the next phase. project continued, but I never saw the sales guy again. The team had a good chuckle and I never understood what the guy was thinking he would achieve with this tactic.

IMHO that is like kids and lying. More often than not, the right answer to the question "Why are you doing this, when we always catch you?" is "Because it works more often than you catching me lying and also because you don't even get that".

Stories like this about IBM were handed down to me by my father. They've been doing this a long time!

My first instinct is that this would be a short term strategy that trades off the company’s good name for marginal sales, but I guess not!

There's a sucker born every minute.

> Their top guy started their pitch by saying he chatted with our CEO over the christmas holidays.

I had a former Oracle employee use a similar line in an interview for a software engineer position. After repeatedly refusing to answer technical questions then admitting they hadn't written software in over a decade:

"I'm actually good friends with someone high up in Company."

You perfectly demonstrated why they shouldn’t be speaking to you. Their schtick is crafted to work on levels where you don’t get to tank the deal until it’s way too late and egos are now on the line.

A little psychological manipulation and marketing gimmicks (including overdressed people and marketing directed to CXOs) goes a long way.

What are these shirts? I must know!

I don't know but my manager was a non-technical guy with passion for fashion and even his shirts weren't as nice!

Unfortunately, still don't know what you're talking about. Probably because I don't have expertise in the area. Am imaging some kind of white-collar business shirt that's... platinum plated? If the design is not extravagant, how would anyone know?

These are the best ones I've ever worn : https://turnbullandasser.co.uk/products/white-west-indian-se...

For the price you'd want them to be.

640$, lol

My entire wardrobe costs less than that, and no, I am not lying.

It must be nice to have enough money to spend on such luxury. Is it really that much better than a $10 t-shirt?

Oh, it is much better than a $10 shirt but its utility doesn't come from it's comfort or purely aesthetics IMHO.

Maybe it's silly but people do judge from appearance because it tells something about you. I have been watching this famous fashion photographer and he was talking about using an iPhone for last photoshoot and he noted that he can do it and charge full price for it only because he already has a name in the industry and a nobody will need to flash large and expensive cameras to justify the price asked.

Think what it it tells about you to wear really nice shirt. Firstly, it implies that you already sold something to someone for a lot of money and you got paid and bought that shirt, right? Secondly it implies dominance at least in one area, you are the person with the best shirt in the room so who knows what else you are best at. Silly but our primate brains easily get intimidated and extrapolate. There are also many other fallacies that our brains easily fall in, so looking impressive is a superpower actually.

Also, everything is a costume. If you are interviewing for a nerdy position you better look like a nerd but you can always be the nerd with the best nerdy shirt.

"Three wolves howling at the moon," might do it. :-D

The nerd costume is a costume too. If I'm wearing a t-shirt and a battered hoodie in a meeting with a bunch of suits, then everyone is going to defer to me on technical matters

Maybe. Mostly they want to keep you on board long enough to find out who writes the cheques.

I have multiple articles of clothing that cost more than that. I’m baffled as to why anyone would want a keyboard that costs more than $100. To each his own.

The keyboardio keyboard I'm typing on (A Model 1) puts substantially less stress on my hands and wrists than any other keyboard I've used. As someone who has had repetitive stress pain in my wrists, I consider it - well, not beyond price, but certainly worth a few hundred dollars when it avoids surgery and enables me to pursue a HIGHLY lucrative profession full time. Each person's hands are different, so maybe you do fine with an inexpensive keyboard, and my keyboard won't suit everyone, but it's a fairly straightforward explanation the way I see it.

Keyboards that cost over $100 tend to be much, much nicer, and are more easily tailored to an individual's taste.

Around $200 and above, most are machined from aluminum, and require the user to supply their own switches and keycaps. My daily driver, whose USB connector seems to be reaching EOL, is a heavy-ass chunk of bright blue Alu, makes noise like a machine gun when I need to correct someone on the internet, and has limited edition keycaps in a fun (imo) purple-and-cyan color scheme. Total cost of this thing was probably $250~$300, but I'm happy.

I have over $1k worth of keyboards and related hardware strewn about my apartment, and the only reason I've considered selling some of my collection is to buy fancier pieces. To each their own.

A crisp, blinding white, heavy oxford cotton shirt that requires cufflinks is noticed by everybody but nerds. In financial circles you can even wear colored shirts but don't stray from blue or pink.

The people who wear those shirts also have expensive shoes. Get the tie right and you can get away with a slightly less expensive suit for technical sales meetings.

A clean shave and neat, well cut hair help too.

Its interesting to look at shoes, tells you a lot about a persons status in a big organisation.

Having said that, my daughter bought me some checkerboard vans so I wear those everywhere now.

Aren't shirts in that range having diminshing returns? like couldn't get a $100 shirt that covers most of the benefits? there has to be a optimal local maximum there right?

Not if you’re in sales, I’d guess. It almost literally tells your target C-suite that you’re cut from the same cloth and to ignore the bleating of underlings. It’s a peripheral cue calibrated to increase bonding and trust. “These are my people. I’m safe with them.”

I guess it's sortof like going into a "hackers" convention and seeing people typing on a 3$ Dell keyboard. Those are not our people. However, the guys in the corner with DasKeyboard or Happy Hacking Keyboard; those ARE our people.

Nothing exotic but extremely good quality and attention to details that you can recognise from distance. No button looks off the shelf, no detail is cheap out. The cut matches the body perfectly and elegantly and the designer and manufacturer definitely went the extra mile even if it wasn't the easiest or cheapest thing to do. Maybe cutting in straight lines would be the easiest way to do it but if the design requires a slight curve, they wouldn't shy away from it. The more you look at it the more details you notice that someone must have agonised over it even if it wouldn't make any functional difference. Just because it's not visible all the time, doesn't mean that can't have a nice design, for example inside the collar has also a seperate design.

I think @sgt101 is onto something.

To expand on this, because I think some of the confusion is probably from more basic concepts...

Clothing patterns, stitching, and details differ in manufacturing time and suitability for mass production.

The vast majority of clothing is optimized for production, because time is expense, and therefore less time is more profit.

In men's sizing, we generally come in fewer shapes. Square-to-athletic-to-slim fit + arm length + overall size.

But for most people, there's still going to be a delta between {hypothetical optimal fit} and {nearest mass-market fit}. So a nice shirt really starts at doing whatever it takes to get closer to optimal fit (even if it requires some difficult, hand-sewn-only magic) and adds better materials and finishes (buttons, button-holes, stitching, etc).

At the end of the day, it's kind of like watches though -- 95% of people won't recognize the differences. I got more complements from C-level folks on my $50 quartz Casio diver [0], because it copies a lot of Rolex details, than anything mechanical without plastic.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Watches/comments/bmld2y/casio_duro_...

My first Oracle experience was similar. Back in the 90s, I was tasked with replacing our old mssql6.5 generic custom built rack log server with something stronger as the product was successful and we had money.

Oracle put me in touch with their eval solutions people who took all my info on number of users, transactions, size, etc and came back with an estimate of a $2M Sun+Oracle box. I told them that the current solution ran on like $10k of licenses and hardware and they revised the spec down to $250k.

They were totally clueless but projected absolute competence.

>1) To apply for Watson access you needed to show C-level approval, so our CEO put his name and phone number on the application (trying Watson was somewhat his idea). A few months later, an IBM marketing team called HIS CELL and asked for ME. Imagine how it felt to have the CEO walk up to me, deadpan hand me his personal iphone and say "It's for you."..

This sounds like the biggest power move you could ever pull.

Everything about this sounds like they hired inexperienced sales people and promised them huge payouts if they could close certain deals. The kinds of sales people who won’t hesitate to burn a lot of customer relationships to the ground as long as they could close a few big deals for themselves.

That's what it felt like, yeah. Also that the tech wasn't able to prove itself so they kept it behind a curtain.

Multiple times they'd book a technical meeting to get us on-boarded and when I got on the call it was all sales people trying.

Wow, I can't believe how accurate this story is, same thing happened to me I think summer 2016 but I thought it was because our execs were idiots not that IBM would treat every company like that... CTO calling me to his office to talk to IBM on their personal phone, he was the only one who wanted Watson (this was a healthcare company, I was VP of Eng). And yes, they were obsessed with putting their logo everywhere, and as soon as we heard it was so expensive, we had to tell our CTO to chill, we stopped, cause you know you can hire at least 2 devs for that money.

Wow, up until now I attributed it to incompetence when really it was a sales tactic. Wild. Thanks for corroborating.

I concur with the experience of dealing with IBM sales.

Years ago my client wanted me to checkout out IBM mobile app builder - Worklight, The pricing wasn't available on website and so I had to contact them. Soon I was reached out by their sales department and before I could get any details on the pricing I was speaking with VP of sales.

If I remember it correctly, It was priced ~>150K USD and even after repeatedly telling the VP that I was just exploring what their product was, The VP told me he was ready to fly in to my office the same week to 'talk further'. It was weird to end that conversation with them and my client had a good laugh when I shared the experience.

I don't get why IBM finds it hard to deal with Startups, All other behemoths (MS/Amazon/Google etc.) have successfully created products for Startups often by offering generous freebies and 'Pay as you go' plans . Where as IBM still thinks they can slap Fortune 500 pricing on entry-level startups.

I guess as long as those Fortune 500 companies & even Govt. fall for that Watson type products, They don't have a reason to change.

IBM don't want to deal with startups. They need big, old, ossified, cashed up businesses who are in some kind of trouble. There isn't any money in most startups that bootstrapped off a pile of open source or free tech.

Startups are more likely to see through the bullshit. It's similar to why spam emails often have intentional spelling mistakes - to get the marks to self-select.

> an IBM marketing team called HIS CELL and asked for ME.

What the fuck is this? A name/email for your company when trying something out is so that you can keep track of any support requests we need, not for you to sell shit to me.

Yeah, the whole culture there (and other places like Oracle) is all about implanting mindshare at the decision-maker level and driving unilateral adoption from the top down. Pursuing such an approach is highly revealing because if the technology actually worked, that approach would not be necessary.

Once they’re “in” at the decision-maker level, they can continue to milk the organisation with long-duration support and consulting contracts, feeding parasitically and gradually becoming more and more entangled.

One spectacular example, 7M budget but in actuality, 1.2B down the drain and nothing to show for it https://blog.beyondsoftware.com/the-queensland-health-payrol...

Oh yeah I worked on a similar project at Oracle. The sales people basically sold the state on a 'stack' with a bunch of random horseshit that was magically supposed to work together and then dumped it on engineering. I mean that in a totally serious way, sales seemingly just grabbed a bunch of names of Oracle software and mashed it together. It literally never worked at any point.

Then Oracle sued THEM about it, lmao.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cover_Oregon

I met one of the "managers" on that who told me with a straight face "All you need is a college degree in anything to manage developers" (hers was in English IIRC)

> Pursuing such an approach is highly revealing because if the technology actually worked, that approach would not be necessary.

This is, sadly, untrue. Enterprise reps do this because on the whole, it doesn't matter if you have the best technology - if the other guy is successful at the CxO level, the customer will go their way.

Correct - not saying that the best technology assures success, but that without working tech, marketing to the CxO level is the sole viable option.

Add this one to the list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_pay_system

> Once they’re “in” at the decision-maker level, they can continue to milk the organisation with long-duration support and consulting contracts, feeding parasitically and gradually becoming more and more entangled.

IBM seems like a really interesting case study in parasitism at the organisational level. Just moving around, feeding from host to host. I wonder if anyone’s studied it in those terms.

Marketers have no sense of boundaries or limits. Everything they do is in violation of social norms. You give them an email that's clearly for some specific and useful purpose, they abuse it by turning it into their personal marketing channel which benefits nobody but them.

Also, C suite phone numbers are worth their weight in gold for sales teams. Confusing that with another person’s number is a pretty bad mistake.

In my experience this seems to be a theme with very senior executives - they are very often interested in snake oil and can’t seem to discern snake oil from real medicine.

This reminded me of my experience with them a few years back with MQTT. They were pushing their Bluemix/cloud hard and I just wanted to test it out. Never again.

This is not an IBM thing only, this is fate of most companies that did not transition from sales led

It used to be you can't get fired for hiring big blue. In the end it was always a lot of sales /pre sales folks, and a lot of substandard subcontractors milking the golden cow. I don't miss managing their implementations/deliveries at all.

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