IBM made some news a couple of days ago announcing consumers can now use Watson to find the season’s best gifts. A quick browse through the app, which is actually just a wrapper around a small dedicated website, shows nothing of the ordinary – Apple Watch, Televisions, Star Wars, Headphones, Legos… not much supercomputing needed. No wonder coverage turned sour after an initial hype, so what was IBM thinking?
Rewind the buzz machines one week back. Google stunned tech media, announcing it is open sourcing its core AI framework, TensorFlow. The splashes were high: “massive potential“, “Machine Learning breakthrough“, “game changer“… but after a few days, the critics were out, Quorans talking about the library’s slowness, and even Google-fanboy researchers wondering – what exactly is TensorFlow useful for?
Nevertheless, within 3 days, Microsoft quickly announced its own open source Machine Learning toolkit, DMTK. The Register was quick to mock the move, saying “Google released some of its code last week. Redmond’s (co-incidental?) response is pretty basic: there’s a framework, and two algorithms”…
So what is the nature of all these recent PR-like moves?
There is one high-profit business shared by all of these companies: Cloud Computing. Amazon leads the pack in revenue, and uses the cash flow from cloud business to offset losses on its aggressive ecommerce pricing, but also Microsoft and Google are assumed to come next with growing cloud business. Google even goes as far as predicting cloud revenue to surpass ads revenue in five years. It is the gold rush era for the industry.
But first, companies such as Microsoft, Google and IBM will need to convince corporates to hand them their business, rather than to Amazon. Hence they have to create as much “smart” buzz for themselves, so that executives in these organization, already fatigued by the big-data buzzwords, will say: “we must work with them! look, they know their way with all this machine-learning-big-data-artifical-intelligence stuff!!”
So the next time you hear some uber-smart announcement from one of these companies that feels like too much hot air, don’t look for too much strategy; instead, just look up to the cloud.
The Alter Egozi 