It is just a stunt from IBM to promote their WATSON software. a 200k$ prize is a small price to pay to get dozens of smart people to team up and work/test/enhance your products for free...
It's more than that. IBM is trying to win developer mind share, future tech decision makers are strategically important to them in their current situation.
I'd love to see a CEO do for IBM what Satya did for Microsoft. A lot of OSS people thought they were the devil, and yet they've turned that around massively. Unfortunately it seems (from the outside) that IBM is just organisationally crippled from size bloat at this point.
Maybe I'm being naive but what do their 350,000 employees actually do? That's nearly as much as Apple, Google and Microsoft combined.
Microsoft had a tremendous headcount as well. But I think that there is a subtle and important difference. Developers at Microsoft see themselves as product creators - and within every creator is a passion for the craft that good leadership can unlock. IBM, to my knowledge, has a much larger proportion of their headcount who are "contract maintainers" - doing contracted work where their KPIs implicitly optimize for "how long can we keep/grow this contract" rather than "how good is the product created."
IBM has a cultural issue that will take far more than strong leadership to change - starting to change those incentives would require a disruption to IBM's business model that could truly hurt short-term financial performance, way more than Microsoft's "hey let's start releasing dev tools for Mac/Linux in ways that don't actually cannibalize PC sales - it's not like those devs were going to switch to Windows anyways - but do make it easy for them to become long-term Azure users."
And rather than fighting on the dev-tools turf, they're trying to gain mindshare with AI-as-a-service for people who aren't really innovating in AI. I'm looking at the icons in my Mac's Dock right now, and Microsoft's winning a ton of them with best-in-class IDEs and productivity software. Watson isn't in every startup developer's Dock. Now, if IBM bought Tableau and moved Cognos in that direction, adding generous free usage tiers, maybe they get Watson-branded icons on that Dock? But I doubt this happens any time soon.
> Maybe I'm being naive but what do their 350,000 employees actually do?
I used to think it was "make chips", but they contracted that out a few years back. IT outsourcing is a big part of it, which tends to drive up staff numbers much faster than in-house projects. They're also still fairly big in business tech like POS systems, although I think that's been shrinking?
(I suppose the other answer is "IBM doesn't know either", given that they've made huge staff cuts to a lot of their older divisions.)
IBM is primarily a service company. They do turnkey software development for large, clueless clients with deep pockets, such as governments across the world.
I agree with you. IBM is late to the show and far behind in terms of Data Scientists using their tools and technologies. I myself ( statistician and data scientist) used IBM products for a short period of time in the context of a PoC. my experience is that, using python/R is much better in the long run than using proprietary software that costs 100k $/year in licencee fees, without forgetting the training /setup cost that comes with any migration to IBM suite.
> using python/R is much better in the long run than using proprietary software that costs 100k $/year in license fees
It does seem like IBM has been caught out by freely available alternatives which are simply better at most scales. It reminds me of what happened to companies selling compilers or corporate VOIP solutions; they didn't just fail to keep up with the market, their entire market was supplanted by open-source solutions and single features in much larger offerings.
IBM has made a fairly productive effort to avoid that, I think, via their consulting/outsourcing divisions and value-added things like cloud solutions. As a result, their data science products are still appealing in terms of ecosystem integration and strong support options for less-technical buyers. But that doesn't seem like a wonderful position to be in long term, since it puts them in competition with AWS/GCP on one end and free tools on the other.
It's an old company and struggles with a heavy legacy. They would need more than just a CEO to move things around.. It's a mindset and from the outside, IBM seems to me like an old government building that provides services in areas where it had 10yo+ contracts and clients are too lazy to switch to a better provider.. it's sad, but they will definitely have the ending NOKIA had.. maybe a bit more painful ending.. we can never know :)
I agree that they need more than just a CEO. IBM's problems are very serious:
1. mid-level staff that's not technical, unable to get results quickly (one tends to get that mentality from massive open-ended consulting engagements w/o clear success metrics in place)
2. surreal TV ads aside, their brand is not visible on a daily basis, there's no consumer offering with IBM logo on it
3. there is no modern cloud offering (Softlayer ain't one)
4. their marketing of Watson has been so extreme, and so out of touch with technical realities, it's becoming a liability
... on the other hand, this is what IBM does have, that I would leverage if I were CEO:
1. solid mainframe business (yes)
2. massive customer list
3. significant infrastructure (softlayer etc) that could be turned into a cloud offering
4. huge long-term consulting engagements that can turn into success stories, if run by ppl capable of delivering quick results
One more thing I would do if I were CEO - I would come up with a way to put that IBM logo in front of people... Perhaps something along the lines of "Alexa for business", based on IBM's flavor of business AI.
Of course, the new direction he set them on (stop developing innovative things, focus instead on high-margin consulting and services) is the one everyone's complaining about now. So...
strategically speaking, YES! they are not just promoting a tool among developers/researchers . it's a whole business approach they are taking. But personally I think they are late to the party. Google, Micro$oft, Amazon.. and all the other open source tools ( Python, R...) are offering a better , more flexible and versatile solutions to the public.
I think they were a bit greedy and selfish, because they could have put this challenge on Kaggle for example, and gotten a much higher momentum (where a high concentration of Data Scientists and enthusiasts are doing interesting stuff)..
