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It was an audacious undertaking, even for one of the most storied American companies: With a single machine, IBM would tackle humanity's most vexing diseases and revolutionize medicine.
Breathlessly promoting its signature brand — Watson — IBM sought to capture the world's imagination, and it quickly zeroed in on a high-profile target: cancer.
But three years after IBM began selling Watson to recommend the best cancer treatments to doctors around the world, a STAT investigation has found that the supercomputer isn't living up to the lofty expectations IBM created for it. It is still struggling with the basic step of learning about different forms of cancer. Only a few dozen hospitals have adopted the system, which is a long way from IBM's goal of establishing dominance in a multibillion-dollar market. And at foreign hospitals, physicians complained its advice is biased toward American patients and methods of care.
[...] Perhaps the most stunning overreach is in the company's claim that Watson for Oncology, through artificial intelligence, can sift through reams of data to generate new insights and identify, as an IBM sales rep put it, "even new approaches" to cancer care. STAT found that the system doesn't create new knowledge and is artificially intelligent only in the most rudimentary sense of the term.
Watson "has failed to end a streak of 21 consecutive quarters of declining revenue at IBM." Ouch.
(Score: 3, Informative) by bzipitidoo on Monday September 11 2017, @04:55AM (1 child)
Anymore, everything IBM does seems crudely calculated to push sales of their hardware. Finesse and elegance reduce the need for computing, therefore IBM pushes brute force approaches to problem solving. What is the point of having speech recognition capability in Watson? Just an excuse to use more hardware.
In the 1980s, they nearly missed out on the personal computer revolution, belatedly throwing together their PC, 4 years after the Apple II. They really didn't want the PC to succeed as that would cut into their mainframe biz.
In the 1990s they blew it with OS/2, failing to aggressively market a product technically superior to Window 95.
And now? What does IBM aspire to now? To be the Dell Computer of high end PC server hardware? They sure haven't tried smartphones or game consoles. At least Microsoft tried. Bunch of wusses scared of Apple. Sad.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 11 2017, @03:43PM
I had roommate back then that had 95/OS/2 warp dual booted, it was actually a much superior OS it even had a 95 emulation mode(which sucked but that's why you have dev's) the problem was it couldn't play games for shit, I'm pretty sure this is the sum total of the reason it failed, work OS's are nice but if people won't use them at home it will never go anywhere Linux is slowly correcting this problem but same deal, both dos and windows where always the gaming platform OS and it shows in MS's market dominance