Re:Ask HN: Is anyone using Watson in their business?
by dkrich on Wednesday October 11, 2017 @08:45AM
(#15449274)
>Watson seems to me like it's mostly leadgen to sell IBM consulting services to companies that don't know how to build software in-house.
This is exactly what it is. It's a marketing product designed to help IBM sell the company overall as a big data company. The only people the commercials are targeted at are C-level execs who don't know the first thing about data science but know they have to invest in it to stay competitive. I don't work for IBM, but I'd wager a lot that the idea for it was created by a sales team and not an engineer.
That said, IBM is certainly not the only business to do this and it's not even clear that it's not a smart business strategy. I'd wager that most enterprise software sales use deception as a major part of sales strategy.
This is exactly what it is. It's a marketing product designed to help IBM sell the company overall as a big data company. The only people the commercials are targeted at are C-level execs who don't know the first thing about data science but know they have to invest in it to stay competitive. I don't work for IBM, but I'd wager a lot that the idea for it was created by a sales team and not an engineer.
That said, IBM is certainly not the only business to do this and it's not even clear that it's not a smart business strategy. I'd wager that most enterprise software sales use deception as a major part of sales strategy.