Their tools are trash for the cost they want. The majority of their offerings are overengineered and prone to failure in a production setting.
They are pros at selling to non-technical management, all the while IT employees get stuck dealing with the aftermath.
We ended up getting stuck with the IBM version of work item management, called Jazz Team Concert. From the "source control" to the actual setup and configuration, the product was a nightmare. The worst part was when we looked at license renewal. They wanted three quarters of a million dollars for something that was essentially dog shit wrapped in cat shit.
In case you thought I might be on the fence with IBM, I'll add one final clarifying point:
Fuck IBM.
Don't be so harsh on all of IBM, its like hundreds of companies under one banner. Not all of them have the power to influence other products and often times end up stuck with it and cannot move on to other tools (i.e git).
More often than not, customers have higher priority on bugs than other teams dog-fooding the product. Its insane.
I think you mean don't be so harsh on the people on the ground at IBM. If the issue is IBM's internal structure is fractured and disorganized then I think it's perfectly fair to blame the company.
The do this so different divisions can lean on each other and benefit from the IBM brand name. If they want the benefits of this shared branding then the deserve the downsides from it too.
I've noticed many companies recently thinking they can have it both ways (samsung and sony come to mind). Live by the brand, die by the brand!
My own anecdote -- we had a need for a GIS/charting/mapping system. IBM responded to the RFP as did many others.
IBM proposed an entire office automation system with a minor charting system hanging off the side somewhere. Most of the components were unfamiliar to everyone. Though maybe there was Wordperfect or Lotus Notes in there. I remember meetings with IBM always had whole bunch of shiny suits whereas more focussed proposals just had one or two people visit.
After one or two rounds of pointless meetings our fairly technical director told them to go fuck off and never come back.
The worst thing though that was despite paying an inordinate amount of money to license this software each year and receive support for it they would not fix a bug we found in their mapping modules.
Specifically it was their use of float for X and Y coordinates in the IlvPoint object that you pretty much had to use to make a map work with their tech. In certain parts of the world there is an extra digit on the Y coordinate (projections) and the float they insisted on using couldn't store the whole value, meaning they would just round it up or down causing inconsistencies between our representation of a client's dataand the client's representation. That was an absolute no-go for us and the workarounds IBM suggested to us were absurd and bordering on insulting honestly.
We had a lot of trouble with our affected clients because of this and all we could tell them was that it was an IBM issue.
The absolutely refused to fix their product and eventually sold it to Rogue Wave, washing their hands of it. By that point though we had already decided on a few alternatives lest we start to lose customers (who were essentially massive utility companies from around the globe).
Fuck IBM.
We are starting a project and even with FTE's within the company, "consultant" has convinced management to hire IBM resources because of cost. The high sounding reason within the presentation twisted it to - FTE's are not expert in this tech so they won't be able to do an efficient job.
But it is always that the end resources from IBM are even more incompetent. They end up delivering a product which is terrible. Even the final handovers and KTs are done terribly.
In the end, management has no option but to continue hiring IBM (or any service business) to support the shoddily done project.
This doesn't mean all implementations from a services business is terrible. It all comes down to cost and ability to spend. If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys - this is aptly true.
To answer your last question - Yes there are different entities within IBM. There is GBS which takes up most of the consulting and up-selling IBM products and services. Development for example Watson is done by IBM Labs. A list can be found here: http://www-07.ibm.com/in/careers/businessunits.html
At an old employer who I'm no longer with, I asked why there's a part of the application in Java (the rest has always been in .net). They told me that an army of IBM consultants made that decision and now there's a part of the code in Java and it sticks out like a sore thumb.
But doesn't the word get around ? does nobody in most enterprizes think long-term when investing ?
IBM is optimized in enterprise (including government) sales. Product is not quite irrelevant, but it's a specialized enough market that often mediocre substantive quality does quite well, because the only competition that matters are the others that are optimized for that market.
Wasn't there a saying that no one got fired for buying IBM.
I've seen it many times.
Misinterpretation is a recursive problem. The best description - by far - of this process is "How a plan becomes policy" (aka, "How Shit Happens").
As the staff back away slowly from the creep, that just makes more space for IBM, and they sell progressively more service hours. It's pretty much their MO.
Broadly, yes, IBM is run as various different divisions, and the divisions start very high up the organisation, only a couple of levels from the top. They rarely interact in my experience (as a software guy there for some years in the past)
I think it expected to be installed in /usr/local and company procedures demanded that it was installed in /opt (or the other way around).
For this it would consequently misplace some permissions on some of the files causing a later stage in the installer to fail and bork the installation.
I bumped into her last year at Ansible Fest London and she was still angry about it 17 years later!
And that's what Oracle does to your soul :)
Edit: that N class and Oracle NEVER got deployed in the end. It just sat there unused, licenses weren't renewed, it got sheepishly powered down after a few months to save electricity and it got chucked in a skip after 5 years. About £200k of expenditure down the pan.
I guess you could easily lost even more money. Good thing they stopped it at £200k.
The whole platform got replaced with SQL Server on a clone PC server in the end which cost less than £10k. No fan of Microsoft but there was no competition. And the tooling was far better!
Legal guys said it wasn't worth suing them because we'd have to pay up then or lose the support contract.
> However, I think you'll see this shift towards a developer-focused mindset happening more-and-more within IBM over the next few years.
means? In a discussion about not trusting IBM's marketing, you can't simply say "I hear you and it will get better, trust me."
I don't work in the same role so I only know things from a 10,000 ft view. But a lot of orgs that IBM works with have inane bureaucratic structures with their in house devs pretty much at the bottom of the food chain, or in an "IT department". All decisions on using tech tools are made by "higher ups" a lot of whom have 0 technical background. We're trying to change this culture to one where devs get to make those decisions AFAIK.
Disclosure: IBM dev, but not a Developer Advocate.
IBM was always unique, could sell you sfw, hdw, hosting, resources, and finance the whole thing. Some business as leaders never really adapt to change because management is stupid (blockbuster, radio shack, blackberry, etc.). IBM had so many chances to compete with Amazon and they failed. Watson is no more than a deflection in the marketplace that masks the real problems from within.
If you can't provide any useful comments, then nothing. What they're saying contributes absolutely nothing to the conversation. Maybe say you'll stop selling non-existent features to executives for starters? I don't appreciate HN becoming an advertising ground to name-drop IBM without any real talking points, please provide some sort of real discussion.
> We're trying to change this culture to one where devs get to make those decisions AFAIK.
Ok, but again how? Or I guess in other words, I don't believe you.
The tradition was still going at that point.
https://www.itnews.com.au/news/queenslands-ibm-ban-lives-on-...
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/phoenix-pay-system-psac...
What do you mean by 'over engineered' in this context? The usual way I've seen that term used would imply 'reliable but more expensive than necessary' rather than 'unreliable'.
Think J2EE and their xml config files.
Or using hadoop and kubernetes when a sqllite db on digital ocean will do
I have seen middle management say very clearly that no one was ever fired for choosing IBM.
Is that just a notable exception or are there better alternatives out there these days for hosted CouchDB?
Not saying it's not good (I've never used it), but IBM can't really get any credit for this. They just happen to have bought a decent product and now they sell it.
I like Cloudant .. it is not too bad. In a recent project (after I left IBM), I needed to get a data tier up quickly and I actually used it for the initial POC. And yes, it was an acquisition by IBM. I was a bit worried that bluewashing would have made Cloudant crap but looks like they have managed to avoid it. The caveat I'd suggest is look closely at the pricing model. If you want QoS and scale, be careful of the pricing model. For small projects and projects that need fast completion (what project today doesn't?), it is actually very nice. You asked for caveats .. I think some of the language bindings were a bit out of date .. but since it uses REST calls, it wasn't too hard to bypass.
It's really easy (largely thanks to Cloudant) to host your own Couch instance but it's also really affordable to let them do it.
[1] E.g. they're pretty open about renaming existing things to fit under the Watson brand: https://www.ibm.com/blogs/bluemix/2016/10/predictive-analyti...
That is a hard sell because requires a truckload of configuration and internal expertise to get a working product out of it, and it ever only solves only some very narrow ranges of solutions.
In typical IBM style, since they can't have a multimillion research division going in red as that would get a bunch of management in trouble, they moved more and more product under the watson name to pad up the division growth and sales numbers.
That's the point where it is now after hoarding anything internal with value. You can see more or less the same with their cloud offer.
More seriously, do you think Microsoft would have been more honest if they'd called Windows "Microsoft Graphical Multitasking Operating System"? Or if BMW had gone with "BMW Better Performance And A Cooler Badge But It'll Cost You" instead of "BMW M"?
Brand names exist for a reason.
Hmm, I'm having a hard time figuring out the N. Ideas?
IBM's sales pitch was that 1) this particular piece of software was "central to IBM's [market niche] strategy", and 2) if we didn't go with IBM's product, we would miss out on all the interoperability with IBM's Watson that the future is going to bring. The tone veered toward fire-and-brimstone. I wasn't sold, I was put off. They've demoed other things in the past that I've had my socks knocked off by, but they're nothing that's the sort of "indistinguishable from magic" that they're promising in all the marketing hype.
The thing is, IBM delivers tremendous value, and they have some fantastic products. However, stunts like that leave people like me with a very sour taste in my mouth. If they'd just focus on delivering a better product, as quantified by hard metrics, (which they could easily afford to do), they'd keep making out like bandits for a very long time. There's tremendous good-will toward them in the market: bad experience aside, I'm still favorably disposed toward them.
We are closing on the IBM bandwagon, but I want to show that there is alternatives.
IBM sells an image, not a working product, and they deserve some ridicule for it.
I have worked with Watson and a decently large IBM consulting team, and 'magic beans' is a diplomatic way of putting it. 'Obfuscatory horse shit' is more accurate.
The good ones use it as a smoke screen to cover for doing things that need to be done but that the C-level isn't necessarily going to like, the bad ones use it as a cover for incompetence.
The fact that you're more concerned about the truth is why you'll never be on the take like them. :-)
We were too stupid to catch on that everybody else is lying.
It's astonishing how much IBM has spent to achieve so little. Per the Jefferies report, IBM spent $15 billion in Cognitive from 2010 to 2015, not including an additional $5 billion in data acquisitions. Even if Cognitive weren't a marketing buzzword invented by IBM to describe if-then statements, that would still be deeply embarrassing. (You could probably double the number of startups funded in Silicon Valley in a year with $20 billion dollars, and I'll bet you'd get much higher returns.)
When you look at the main open-source AI frameworks, none of them were created by IBM, because IBM was incapable of building them. There are individual startups that have done more in AI, using far fewer resources.
And the real shame is that IBM is convincing rubes to buy their cognitive trash, and the rubes are doing it. And when the rubes' bosses realize that the rubes blew the AI budget and the "AI" delivered nothing, those rubes are getting canned. You can get fired for buying IBM. I've seen it.
There's a Madoff-like quality to IBM's Watson sales strategy. The more they fail, the wider they circle to depend on dumber and dumber money from abroad. They're going after rural Scandinavia. They're selling to 3rd-tier cities in China. Just imagining targeting a buyer with the sophistication of the mayor of Mobile, Alabama. That's where IBM Watson is selling strong.
IBM has been poisoning the well in the AI industry for years, teaching customers to be gun-shy and scared of an important technology, just because they blew their money on a dog to begin with. I don't believe an AI winter will come, but if it did, IBM would be the main culprit.
Even if Watson's many mysterious technologies worked, they would still have a lame business model, because most of AI, and the best of AI tooling, is open source. IBM's trying to sell a secret sauce, even as it declines to participate in competitions that would should how Watson stacks up against other tech. Oren Etzioni has been calling them out for years. [1,2,3]
Anyone wondering how IBM came to this sorry pass should read Robert Cringely's "The Decline and Fall of IBM." It's a company run by a clueless management class, who probably believe the smoke they're blowing up everyone else's ass. That's the scary part: The C-suite at IBM actually bought that hype about Watson, until they started to see the numbers, and the numbers sucked. That's why they don't break them out in the quarterly earnings reports. IBM is not signing up the Watson partners it thought it would. [0]
Watson makes claims to solve everything. But when you dig in with the sales people, the only success story they cite is Memorial Sloan Kettering (MSK). It's suspicious, considering how many other organizations they must have worked with. H&R block is bragging about Watson technology, too, but that's just because they think the marketing gimmick will work for them as well as it's worked for IBM.
The real problem in a situation like this is that very few people have an incentive to get the truth out. IBM doesn't want its stock price to dive. And all the customers are mortified that they failed and wasted their money. And they probably had to sign some non-disparagement clause to boot.
[0] http://www.cringely.com/2016/09/07/carrie-underwoods-america...
[1,2,3] https://twitter.com/etzioni/status/654486809825570817
Do you mean UIMA, GATE? What else? These are frameworks comparable with Watson (at least the original thing, not the PR fuzz).
It might be easy to understand what Charlie really meant when you are already familiar with the project, but the non-technical viewer will walk away thinking of Watson as a single, coherent entity sitting in an IBM vault somewhere. Conflating ML-based expert systems with anthropomorphic AI is farcical, supporting the accusations that IBM is overselling its product. It is also irresponsible, because it fuels the idea in the popular mind that machine learning is creating independent intelligences rather than mere tools.
I agree the language is problematic for non-technical viewers, but at the same time these are difficult concepts to explain to non-technical people, and explain the details of what it can't do is obviously much less compelling than focusing on what it can do.
But that's not the problem, is it? It's not that IBM is trying to explain something difficult. Rather, if IBM was trying to be honest, the box that won Jeopardy would be called Watson, and the box they're now trying to sell everyone and their dog would be called "Whitney, Watson's big sister" or whatever. At the very least, "Watson the third".
By calling it the exact same name, you are trying to convince us it's the exact same thing just with more training. Which it's not.
Others mentioned poisoning the well; round here the expression is "pissing in the well", which I think fits much better.
Theirs at least one post in this thread that goes into detail on the limitations of Watson Health (it mentioned oversold capabilities that led to a medical institution wasting ~$60 million dollars, but you would be right to point out that I have no direct examples from memory on why the 60 minutes coverage itself was 'absurd'. If anything its the effectiveness of Watson marketing (and other companies marketing of AI) that gets to me and how it is even becoming pervasive in cultural icons like 60 minutes.
I'd want to see:
0. A baseline measurement.
1. Comparison to the nearest compatible.
2. Comparison against a simple algorithm/expert system.
Overall that probably helps the brand with some groups, and harms it with others (scientists, engineers) so you may have more work to convince them, though the puff pieces might help sell it at the exec level.
I'm reminded of the horrors of early-2000s enterprise Java.
could be worse, could be magic beans from IBM Blockchain.
Thank you for sharing your view. If you'd like to talk more about how we can better message our offerings, please feel free to reach out. I'd love to learn more about the kinds of problems you are trying to solve.
Edit: yes, I know, this is a bland response to the parent. But change needs feedback.
Edit 2: thanks matt4077
"Change", as used here, is a noun based on the verb "to change". If your sentence calls for a verb, you can just go back to the original "to change".
Something isn't essential "toward" something else. It is essential "for" something else.
"is essential" is unnecessarily passive. Use active verbs.
"getting feedback" is slightly wrong, because what you need is the feedback, not the act of getting it.
"At the same time" is used here because it sounds smarter than "but". Don't do that.
Try this: "Change needs feedback".
Not all brevity is the soul of wit.
How about "for change to happen, we need your feedback"? I think that conveys the message and request accurately and succinctly.
> I'd love to learn more about the kinds of problems you are trying to solve.
This doesn't sound genuine. This type of delivery almost never sounds genuine. You wouldn't "love" to learn about those problems, and even if you would, virtually no one will believe you because the same corporate speak delivery is used by people who have no commitment to action.
I know you probably just said this unconsciously, but when you use phrases like "I'd love to learn more about the kinds of problems you are trying to solve", it reeks of a comment written and vetted by a team, including brand/social/marketing/PR/whatever the team is in your org that controls employee disclosures.
I've been on the inside of orgs and watched this PR spin sausage cooked up. Someone wants to respond to a controversy brewing on reddit, oh wait, better run it by the the #social channel and make sure everyone agrees this is our best foot forward...wonderful, now we've essentially guaranteed that people don't feel empathized with whatsoever.
Just solicit feedback like a human being. It's okay to "disclose" that you work at IBM (although: jeez, what a corporate-y way to go about it), but speak to people in a conversational tone that doesn't sound like a customer support Twitter account.
I'm sure there are companies, and probably parts of IBM, that have to run their communication by legal, but I'm not part of that. It's just how I talk.
I can't guarantee change on any particular issue, and it would ludicrous for me to act as if I speak for the nearly 400,000 IBM employees, so I temper what I say out of a desire to be honest.
My purpose in this thread is to find people who want to share their experience and I assume, perhaps naively, that is part of the purpose of commenting online.
No matter, the discussion in this thread has already been very valuable and I do appreciate everyone's comments, even throwaways.
Talking about market strategy, no one knows what IBM does anymore other than garner support contracts and land body-shop jobs. Everyone knows Watson because it's won Jeopardy and a few other games. But that's not because Watson is ground-breaking or anything, but because IBM hasn't done anything else new in 5-10 years. So Watson seems less like a crowning achievement, and more like debris from the Titanic. The company's treading water, and barely, at that.
Sales, however, swears that Watson can do everything from getting the best tax return to curing hair-loss and replacing 80% of the work force. But anyone who's not a fool knows that current AI still has to be tailored towards an industry to be useful. And that's still going to take a huge amount T&M investment. Which you can see from the well-known failed (and expensive) Watson projects.
Usually the only companies who fall for it are the ones where management is less about technical skills and more about kickbacks and favor trading. Or national/international-level contracts where the most important thing required is someone to blame or sue when things inevitably go wrong. Everyone else either understands the technology is more complicated than the presentation, or they have enough insight into IBM to discount the powerpoints.
I mean, IBM still isn't as bad as Oracle. But, if I had to pick a metaphor for IBM's reputation... I'd go with "IBM is as much an innovator as Steven Seagal is an action star."
Dishonesty is ESSENTIAL to IBM Watson marketing. Specifically, IBM has taken a whole lot of different technologies and rebranded them as "Watson", so as to pretend that the Jeopardy-playing system is actually a big practical deal.
IBM's reputation over the decades earns it the benefit of the doubt on bold technical initiatives ... for a while. But when IBM doesn't deliver, the benefit of the doubt runs out. And that's happened now with Watson.
IBM's Watson, for me, has been so much marketing fluff that it's in the Oracle class of "only bought by people who don't know better". A profitable business line, but not a problem solving business line.
IBM sends out a team for each of the engagements to work with the business unit leaders to educate them on the capabilities of Watson and how to train Watson. It was all pie-in-the-sky stuff. Since we're an engineering-oriented company our business executives tend to have a strong engineering background (we tend to promote from within) and the whole thing smelled fishy to them, sounded too good to be true. When they asked us IT guys about it we presented the problems mentioned in the first paragraph. They concurred.
So we've never taken the bait. That's the problem you're having with Watson.
I don't want to say that's your fault. I get it, I have a job too.
---
Honestly I wonder what IBM does these days.
Watson is a professional service Machine Learning thing, which can't be profitable. Onsite engineers enguaging one customer rarely is.
Power8/9 has flopped. Nvidia only appears to be on board to kick sand in Intel's eyes.
Then there's... Mainframes?
I know IBM has a cloud now, but honestly it's prices are far high then AWS or Azure.
The problem isn't the message. Everyone already drank the kool-aid. A lot of the problem is just the shoddy product, but really it boils down to the culture.
Put out comprehensive documentation _on the indexable Internet_ and not in PDFs, because for christsake if I have to open another Red Book PDF I think I might kill myself.
Make things that are open source -- and I don't mean Open Source™. Let me learn the platform. Let me hack away at an i Series or whatever on my own time.
Everything is so buried behind licensing and paywalls and PDFs and just general bullshit that I can _never_ invest in _anything_ IBM on a personal level. The vendor lock-in is so heavy that I resist even wasting time learning IBM products because in the back of my mind I'm always thinking "I'll never be able to take this with me to a new job."
The garden walls are too high.
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> Put out comprehensive documentation _on the indexable Internet_ and not in PDFs
But IBM does do exactly this--and more than a lot of companies!
For example, IBM Knowledge Center [1] houses the documentation for over 3000 IBM products and services, and offers up more than 13M english pages--without a sign-in even, and we translate our official content into over 30 languages.
IBM KC is very well indexed by Google, too (we take pains to make that happen).
We also offer custom search and links to more freely available IBM documentation. Our Cloud development docs--Bluemix docs, are also quite public, though some, it's true, are behind a cloud product sign-in.
Redbooks, too, are available in HTML, not just PDF. They can be found on the web and are indexed by Google too, as are articles from developerWorks and Technotes from Support.
So I really don't understand the complaint about our documentation. Almost none of it is behind a sign-in, let alone a for pay firewall, and almost all of it is freely available to anyone, not just our customers.
Hope this helps!
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[1] ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter
i has always been a garden wall and I don't think it's realistic to expect that platform to open up at this stage. That's why Linux on Power exists - tell your boss he/she would have better luck retaining/attracting people if they'd spin up some Linux lpars.
The older IT generations like i just the way it is.
My comment was literally the response from the Eliza chatbot when fed your comment. It was an admittedly oblique attempt at humour. My apologies.
Yes, there are opportunities. No, I do not believe IBM could solve mine, because of the overpromise, underdeliver. I would only speak with a sales team, or a PM, if my boss ordered me to.
You know who got this right? Fucking Dominos, of all companies. They took a hard look at themselves and said, yeah, we've been making a shit product. We don't want to do that any more. So here's what we're doing.
If you want to get a community like this to respond, you need to put the onus on yourself first. Don't go "hey, explain to us what's wrong." You need to figure that out on your own! At least pitch some possibilities. Show some evidence that you've put in the work before crowdsourcing your five year plan. Otherwise you just look lazy and like you want the community to fix your business. And that isn't their job.
Not exactly a display of maturity from this community.
> You need to figure that out on your own
Even IF an employee has a pretty clear idea themselves what needs to be improved, having a citable CUSTOMER opinion to that effect is going to vastly improve the chances of management listening.
I understand that this is what they want. They want to drive executives' interest in the product, but I believe they do so at the expense of their goodwill with the tech community.
Am I the only one who cringes when these ads air?
Edit: "magic beans" is harsh and it isn't that I don't think their tools are good. My point is that they put you in a position where it seems very unlikely to meet expectations.