Watson for all it's academic glory, was kind of vapourware as a product.
It just never really did anything materially useful. They did a lot of hospital trials that fizzled. Way, way over-promised.
A little bit along the lines of ElementAI - it's hard to commercialized AI directly.
Google et. al. do it right by incrementally improving things like translation, voice recognition ... it's making waves within academia for it's quality, but it's something consumers are hardly aware of.
Since IBM is not a consumer company, there's only so much sugar and hype that Watson can provide (winning Jeopardy was a brilliant thing) before the rubber has to hit the rode.
I'm not so sure if it's fair to blame a new leader for that one ... because I'm not sure what a realistic business application for Watson would be. (Maybe there are hard and real products, but they're probably going to be very context specific etc..)
Building great tech is hard enough, then building great products on top of that - just as hard. Doing it within a massive multinational that makes it's money from grifting governments and megacorps into paying for really expensive services probably just is not going to work.
MS, Google, FB ... they have the operational fidelity and product line to leverage AI internally, IBM, not so much.
I don't know what the future of IBM looks like aside from just being another Accenture.
Ultimately much of the system had to be rewritten and this took years by which time, it was just another competitor in a crowded market
I agree completely that the change in leadership marked an inability to really bring WATSON to market, and some other products too.
While I was an intern, I sat next to ExtremeBlue interns and team members working on Watson. The technology was awesome and they were working like mad. Sleeping under the desk. By 2015 the push had stopped and everyone knew it was a failure to launch.