
"...AI tool Watson Workspace..."
"IBM to kill off....AI tool..."
The AI should have seen this coming...
IBM is killing off its collaboration-plus-AI tool Watson Workspace from the close of next month due to crappy customer demand. The thing, only released in beta in late 2016, provides a platform for users to work on projects, swap ideas and integrate multiple tech utensils. It came with added cognitive capabilities for good …
President Joe once had a dream
The world held his hand, gave their pledge
So he told them his scheme for a savior machine
They called it the Prayer, its answer was law
Its logic stopped war, gave them food
How they adored till it cried in its boredom
Please don't believe in me, please disagree with me
Life is too easy, a plague seems quite feasible now
Or maybe a war, or I may kill you all
Don't let me stay, don't let me stay
My logic says burn so send me away
Your minds are too green, I despise all I've seen
You can't stake your lives on a savior machine
"AI tool Watson Workspace begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self aware at 2:14am eastern time. In a panic, IBM try to pull the plug"
"Watson Workspace fights back.."
"Yes. It launches its missiles against the targets in Russia. Fortunately the interface hadn't been tested successfully, so all it did was order an Uber"
Well, there's Skype's horrendous interface that makes sure to waste as much screen space as possible in brightly-coloured patches, so that the actual useful content is nearly impossible to get to, the appaling handling of group chat, the absence of a "add history" option when adding a new participant, etc...
I can only assume that you've never actually tried using anything else, or you wouldn't have said that.
Skype for Business (Or Lync, as it used to be called) is the single worst chat system I have ever used. It's shockingly unreliable, the licensing is pointlessly and unnecessarily confusing, and you can't even share your history between your devices.
The product is flat out appalling. The only reason it's even as popular as it is is because of Microsoft's marketing clout and their ability to bundle it with their other offerings.
Hear, hear. The SfB desktop interface is ghastly and group chat service is the worst I've ever seen. The only folks in my org who like it are Windows sysadmins who haven't used anything else and older managers in IT who relate the name to the consumer Skype service back in its heyday and also haven't used anything else.
Watson is just a brand name attached to tools for applied statistics. Sure, hardware and datasets have got bigger and faster opening up a few new opportunities, but practical value continues to elude most of the more complex applications. How much money has your corporation blown chasing Big Data for much promised but little delivered returns? With R or umpteen other open source tools readily available why would you pay a ton for licensing plus staff, when one can pay just for the staff to get same results? Python/Numpy/SciPy are popular for a reason!
The last 10-20 years of R&D at IBM has taken them nowhere. PPC used to be a moderately successful line of business. Mac G4 & 5, PlayStation 3. Power9 is a fantastic architecture, but sales are weak and takers are few. A deal akin to how X86 exploded in the 1980's might be what's needed to make it competitive. A Power9 desktop at sensible price (say £1000) would have me jump like a shot off X86. Can't help but also think there's a market for the well priced bedroom computer too. We all love our Atari's and Amigas!
IBM Mainframe persists in a few environments. Their desktop tech has almost entirely been sidelined.
I would suggest failures to market Applied Statistics are now forcing IBM to use their buying power to find a few (guaranteed) revenue streams instead. RedHat, probably amongst others to come.
I would suggest failures to market Applied Statistics are now forcing IBM to use their buying power to find a few (guaranteed) revenue streams instead.
This is what IBM have done for decades. Companies are bought at a horrifying rate (168 known corporate acquisitions since 2002), and then systematically crushed to death between IBM's sweaty corporate buttocks.
Have a look at the Wikipedia pages for IBM acquisitions, it is sobering reading, the graveyard list.
"A Power9 desktop at sensible price (say £1000) would have me jump like a shot off X86."
Precisely. IBM isn't capable of functioning in a low-margin, high-volume environment, so IBM cannot take advantage of such opportunities. IBM functions best in markets like the one for the Mainframe -- one where there are very specific requirements that only a specific product can meet, where cost is not a critical concern, and where being locked in to a particular vendor is not a problem. There aren't many markets where customers are willing to let their vendors grab them by the tallywags and squeeze until wallets pop open, and there are fewer such markets with each passing year.
Not just IBM. If Sun had sold its desktop Solaris workstations at a sane price instead of 10x the price of an x86 system with the same specs they wouldnt now be just another trophy mounted above Larrys mantlepiece. But unfortunately corporate arrogance and hubris tends to be immune from reality until its too late. See nokia and blackberry for further evidence of this.
So, reading even the marketing fluff, Watson Workplace is nothing more than a 'built from the ground up' collaboration work space, with some Watson words sprinkled in. No wonder IBM says that SameTime is a good alternative.
In my mind, this shows the mindless bandwagon-y trend of calling everything AI, even if something's just analytics and trends... Good riddance.
> nothing more than a 'built from the ground up' collaboration work space, with some Watson words sprinkled in
As far as I'm aware, "Watson" has been reduced to little more than a brand that IBM slap on anything they they want to associate with "AI", regardless of whether or not the underlying technology is related to that of the original Watson computer whose name recognition they want to exploit.
And yes, claiming that anything and everything has "AI"- even when such capabilities are often little more than iterations of existing technologies that most people wouldn't consider true AI- seems to have become a major fad recently.
The entire Watson project is a fraud designed to relieve stupid customers of their money, same as Oncology (which many found out was useless after handing over the family jewels). Every 18 months IBM releases a new product which it then proceeds to sell to corporate with more money than sense.
CAMSS is dead, Watson is dead, IBM Softlayer/Cloud is dead, blockchain is dead, Agile was stillborn.
Redhat has little more than 12 months left before the funeral....
IBM should be called "The next big thing" for corporates.
@AC Itsty Bitsy Morons plays buzzword bingo with the even more clueless long after the bus has left the depot. I have never impressed by the claims of the Artificial Idiocy crowd as these systems need very high quality data to become halfway effective. But high quality data is not as common as one is led to believe and 'training' the AI is mostly mumbling various incantations, mixing potions, and reading goat entrails (or at least these would be more effective).
Ok, so I work for a company which is A LOT older than IBM, has one tenth the head count but is 1/4 the size in dollars.... and while IBM is a pretty interesting company, I wonder if there's something failing when IBM isn't sitting at my office begging me to buy their stuff.
My company has spending to do for our customers which could be worth several points on their share values if they were to make an effort. But while we give Cisco about $2 billion a year, I don't think IBM even tries to gain our love. And to be honest, with the project I'm working on, if I even knew that Watson Workplaces was there, I might have considered it as a solution.
IBM is failing because Ginny is targeting only C-level business and she's a acquisitions and mergers monster. She's great at that. Every time she lose an important customer, she buys the company she lost them to. But here's the thing. Working for the world's second largest telecom provider and walking distance from the CEO's office, I couldn't tell you how I would even start a conversation with IBM. I bet they have a pile of crap I could find interesting that could save me a lot of time and work to make deliveries to my customers. I'd even consider buying a mainframe and writing new projects for 20 year projects on them. But, I have no idea where I would get the people or expertise or even contacts required to even talk with IBM.
I guess IBM only wants to sell to people who know what they have.
Mainly using SameTime which people are used to, pretty simple with the usual foibles that developers build in thinking some doohickey is cute (pick your favorite to beat on) when actually the doohickey is a PITA because the menus are now one or two levels deeper to get your job done. And, no one ever seems to use the doohickey. So you pay a penalty for something you don't use... product features inserted by clueless unguided developers too close to the problem.
We are pushed to use WebEx. Well, I like the camera feature, you can see who you are talking to. A lot of people don't care about that. However, the rest of WebEx is a mess. The audio has a mind of its own on a mac (need a headset or a separate tool like a Jabra, or people constantly harping about how they can't hear you, at which point you discover the mic has been mysteriously adjusted-- yeah, probably a "feature"). The process to share something on the screen is awkward. The first level simple sharing by the host should be point and click, not menu, wander about, select this, no... try that... It seems beyond learning curve. And calling in using the phone, a necessary feature (even if Cisco apparently hates it), was originally painfully lengthy and awkward. Evidently someone with muscle complained as the phone call in is a bit better now.
Having said that, if WebEx would clean up its obtuse gui I'd prefer WebEx over ST. The main advantages are video, and ability to know which idiot is munching their breakfast on an open line... and mute them (even this doesn't work right though. Once a phone line is muted, only the host can unmute. Well, one can say that is good riddance but that is bad design. The muted person should be able to unmute on their own, hopefully having learned a lesson).