IBM Explores Sale of IBM Watson Health (wsj.com) 32
IBM is exploring a potential sale of its IBM Watson Health business, WSJ is reporting, citing people familiar with the matter, as the technology giant's new chief executive moves to streamline the company and become more competitive in cloud computing. From a report: IBM is studying alternatives for the unit that could include a sale to a private-equity firm or industry player or a merger with a blank-check company, the people said. The unit, which employs artificial intelligence to help hospitals, insurers and drugmakers manage their data, has roughly $1 billion in annual revenue and isn't currently profitable, the people said. Its brands include Merge Healthcare, which analyzes mammograms and MRIs; Phytel, which assists with patient communications; and Truven Health Analytics, which analyzes complex healthcare data. It isn't clear how much the business might fetch in a sale, and there may not be one. IBM, with a market value of $108 billion, has been left behind as cloud-computing rivals Microsoft and Amazon.com soar to valuations more than 10 times greater. The Armonk, N.Y., company has said it's focused on boosting its hybrid-cloud operations while exiting some unrelated businesses. IBM last year signaled its new focus with the appointment of Arvind Krishna, who had run the company's cloud and cognitive-software division, to succeed longtime CEO Ginni Rometty.
Was the original Watson a benevolent dictator? (Score:3)
Actually crossing over from another website, but the concepts turn out to be relevant here. However I think it's going to take a bit of juggling to make it clear... Perhaps beyond my output capacity?
The Watson technology is extremely clever. It could even be highly useful, and healthcare is definitely a field where it could be applied to great effect producing great value. But IBM has apparently concluded that the technology is more valuable to some other company. In other words, IBM is declaring they canno
Re: (Score:2)
Ok, I ran your own comment text through the Personality Portrait analyser and got this:
You are likely to:
like musical movies
be sensitive to ownership cost when buying automobiles
have experience playing music
You are unlikely to:
like country music
be influenced by social media during product purchases
prefer style when buying clothes
Ok, Now how accurate is this?
Re: (Score:2)
Sorry. I foolishly assumed that you might pay attention to what you were doing. There is quite a bit of documentation on the page. However it appears I should have noted that you need to feed it a sufficient body of text.
By the way, you should consider the target audience. You'll get different results if you give it different kinds of input. For example, if you give it your personal correspondence with close friends, it will reveal what sort of person you are when you are writing for people you like and res
Re: Was the original Watson a benevolent dictator? (Score:2)
Public masturbation of 989977 (Score:2)
Z^-1
Hi, Bot! Harassing other people today? (Score:1)
What, did ya miss me?
Public masturbation of 1673220 (Score:2)
Z^-2
Who would buy it? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
If I had my way, it'd be bought by Cisco or Avaya or Polycom...and then integrated into their phone systems to provide actually-useful IVR-based connectivity.
Right now, most phone systems have push-button menu trees, and voice prompts essentially end up saving people from one whole button push...which isn't very useful, and tends to frustrate users because a call may not fit properly into one category or another, leading to a merry-go-round of hold music (and on-hold announcements telling them things they a
Re: (Score:2)
2. If I recall, Watson doesn't have speech recognition. When it played Jeopardy, a human had to manually enter the question in text form.
3. This isn't what Watson was designed to do. Its breakthrough is its ability to parse vast tombs of text to provide reliable answers. It's like a super librarian. If you have a mountain of doc
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
a common tactic is to bury the other side with useless documents, so they waste huge amounts of time and money to sift through it
You mean like printing out 25,000 emails and sending paper instead of delivering them electronically? Only a guilty person would try that trick.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
1. This already exists. I called Capital One Bank a while back and had a normal conversation with a computer. It parsed my questions accurately, and gave me accurate answers.
The only time I call a bank or other service company is when I can't get the answer or perform the task on line. My experience thus far is that automated phone systems can only barely do some-to-most of what can be done through their company's web site. I've never, ever had good service from a bot, yet. They just aren't equipped to handle exceptional conditions which, again, is the only time I call because I know I need to talk to a human. I wish companies would understand that idea. I take umbrage whe
Re: (Score:2)
I take umbrage when companies answer their phone and play an unskippable message that says, effectively, "please try to do what you want to accomplish via our web site; it's shiny!"
Sing it out, brother! And, to paraphrase...
Put my fist through my phone with its ding-dong "you our dear customer is our greatest priority" inside my ear
Re: (Score:2)
Really? You can't imagine someone at IBM bolting on one of the many speech recognition systems out there as a front end? There are plenty to choose from, given Apple, Google, and Amazon have devices that work reasonably well. Sure they don't work 100% with everyone, but if you're waiting for a human and the computer can't understand you, it's not a huge deal since you'll s
Re: (Score:2)
That would be nice, but they'll never implement it. They don't WANT it to be easy for you to switch to the silver plan. They want to make it so hard to do anything that the easy answer is to hang up and pay the higher bill in perpetuity. If customer support was actually anything but a painful exercise in futility, people might actually want customer support.
Far better to make sure people don't have anywhere else to take their business to that isn't even more expensive and painful.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
IBM has ambitious goals but can't seem to get their projects past novelty. Deep Blue only beat Kasparov with help of humans and later only by a computer bug. Blue Gene was an expensive POWER cluster, it was typically much cheaper and easier to use an Intel platform, you had to make custom code, the whole thing is a disaster unless you code and optimize everything from scratch (I know, I've worked on one) and nowadays pretty much any BlueGene cluster has been obsoleted with a rack of Tesla cards.
Watson suffe
Liability (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
> Just like a self-driving car, who do you sue when someone gets hurt or injured?
If someone gets hurt, you first try to help them and call for help. After that you should try to figure out why it happened and try to prevent it from happening again. Why does your mind suggest that best action in such scenario would be to sue someone first?
But to answer your question. You do what you would do when a bridge collapses or when a building collapses. Or what you would do when someone manufactures and sells car
Re: (Score:2)
You do what every other medical software advising software package does - put in big legally written disclaimers that this is offered for advice/reference only and that it is not a substitute for the clinician's judgement. The medical software field has been run on this basis for years. The bottom line is that the physician gets sued. Which is why we pay them the big bucks - to pay their big malpractice insurance fees.
Re: (Score:1)
No, we pay doctors a lot because we don't like to die every time we cut ourselves. If you paid doctors a minimum wage, you'd get into situations like Cuba where brain surgeons make less than a guy at the airport carrying luggage which depends fully on tourist tipping them. In the long term this leads to an exodus from the practice. It's why we have so many European, Indian and Asian doctors in the US, obviously we have a shortage of people in the medical field, but we pay them so very well that people abroa
IBM scraping to find businesses to sell (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I'd give you a mod point if I ever had one to give. You might want to look at my earlier comment in this discussion about crown jewels and the selling off thereof.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm looking forward to the day they start selling off segments of their conveniently sliced logo.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't know why the other commenters cry about Watson (the AI tech) when this article is about Watson Health (essentially ISV for healthcare services).
As for the rest of IBM, it's a mammoth organization with tentacles all over (plus add the $33Billion USD Red Hat acquisition) so the Watson Health covers only $1B of their annual revenues.
Re: (Score:2)
Over $77B USD in annual revenue from all kinds of services. Watson Health is only $1B.
Dog and its reflection (Score:2)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]