Watson is the IBM marketing department going mad about ways in which IBM can continue to remain relevant in a world that increasingly doesn't care about what hardware a particular computer program runs on.
If there is going to be a 'second AI winter' I fully expect Watson and other such efforts to be the cause.
IBM hasn't been about the hardware for a long time, instead it has been about the consulting services contract. And when we, as a startup, first engaged with the Watson folks it was clearly a sales funnel for their consulting services.
That said, IBM has a tremendous amount of research they have done in AI over the years. It is not that they don't have a lot of interesting technology they can throw at different business problems, it seems like they are having a hard time getting invited to the party if they don't track the same hype buzz that the current ML/AI craze has embraced.
The Watson stuff is so oversold it is almost comical.
And yes, sure IBM hasn't been about hardware for a long time, they've been a services company for decades now. But as far as AI/ML is concerned Google and Facebook are attracting the top talent these days, Apple and Microsoft much further down the line.
What would be nice is if they would take the opposite tack, rather than marketing the hell out of it quietly solve lots of problems that are hard to solve in a traditional way. Every time I hear about Watson it is in the context of something where I ask myself "What's the point of being able to do that?". If all there is to hype is the hype itself then it is hollow.
Yes. IBM should be best positioned among AI-aware companies to augment and extend "deep" knowledge-bases into the enterprise. The information infrastructure of Jeopardy Watson was impressive and ought to open doors for IBM to partner productively with other info management vendors to modernize and advance that corporate infrastructure which is driven by deep information. But instead it appears the short-term ROI-think of their non-technical SVPs is what's led them astray.
IBM continues to make the mistake that the flash bang uber-sexiness of ML (esp deep learning) matters more to the enterprise than deep info management (something which IBM can proffer while most competitors can't). If IBM were smart, they'd leverage their deep experience in databases and IR and promote that side of AI -- smarter info management. IMHO, this could do much more for their bottom line than the stupid pretense that Watson really is HAL 9000.
Here I am doing a reasonably good impression of Watson, by totally missing your point and just adding that we have already had (at least) two AI winters, this would be (at least) the third coming up, if it does.
If there is going to be a 'second AI winter' I fully expect Watson and other such efforts to be the cause.