Dear engineers, merit is useless when you're trying to sell something. Authority is king, and people remember emotion and hyperbole. Marketing and sales is almost always about representing authority regardless of merit. The only thing that matters after a Watson sale is if Watson can help solve the problems the customers have.
True, it's well known that engineers don't often have appreciation for the emotionality of marketing. But there's a limit here. We can't just have no-holds-barred hyperbole and outright lying to the point of unfairly deceiving customers.
Obviously it takes a legal professional to judge where that line falls, but for something as specialized as this it's hard for laypeople to appreciate the distinction between stretching the truth with enthusiastic self-promotion and full-on false advertising. It's interesting to think about.
Well, it might be argued that with the exception of this author (who apparently coined the terms they're using) neither the IBM marketers, nor any of the potential consumers understand what these words mean. It is pure abstraction to most people. If the marketers were pressed, I'd guess that they'd just define these terms differently than the people making claims of fraud.
I'm imagining the glossy eyes of a judge or jury trying to grasp the nuance and just throwing in the towel.
Well, there's also the opportunity cost of capex leaked away from areas that it could be productively focused on, also the opex of running the new implementation. And the missed opportunity from building skills in implementing opensource alts - like Tensorflow, for example.
Since we're thinking like CTOs we need to account for risk, not cost. IBM sells Watson to companies with money, and for those clients the factors driving decisions are more often risk and liability. A CTO with budget who chooses to build in-house is taking a big risk. If IBM fails, they can cover their ass with a contract. If they fail in-house there is no such safety net. Easier to save face with the board.
