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Comment by y-curious | Hacker News Reader

I don’t understand who the target audience of these ads is. For most people, including myself, this is like seeing an ad for “New and Improved Time Machine! (Untested)” or “Magic Beans - Indica”.

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These ads are aimed at the board members of IBM's customers. IBM has been doing this for ages. I might think IBM is a high margin body shop with a veneer of innovative-ish projects like Watson that are almost comically out of step with the rest of the tech industry. But that's not the golf course discourse.

The purpose is to make it safe to remain an IBM customer.

And I'd add that there are a ton of quantum startups out there. Maybe they are all idiots. But, if you're IBM with a large research organization that's been working on some related foundational technologies for literally decades, it's not an obviously wrong-headed move for IBM Research to be working in this space.

I agree that they should be doing a press release and a separate technical deep dive.

Here they mix both and don’t get the public. It has always been IBM problem to correctly target the product to the audience.

We see it here again

Everyone who is curious? I mean did you know that you can run something on a real quantum computer for free? Go try out something new, or are we only getting excited about the newest AI slop machine release these days?

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