Is IBM’s Watson more valuable than Amazon’s Alexa?
We’re old enough to remember sitting in front of an IBM PC 5150 at one point — well before Van Halen made those 4 digits relevant to the pop culture. That was at a time where the old slogan “no one ever got fired for buying IBM” was the general approach to technology.
But when was the last time you bought IBM? For most of us, that opportunity has only come when we’ve added the stock to a portfolio at some point in time. No, the average consumer hasn’t had much interaction with “Big Blue” these days, and neither have too many CTO’s and CEO’s for that matter.
IBM’s Watson is interesting to us, because as an artificial intelligence “brand”, it probably has wider brand recognition than the Alexa brand from Amazon. The Watson ads have been run on TV for years and they’ve done a great job and demonstrating the power of the logic behind it. We all remember the ads about how Watson was able to beat the World Chess Champion. But the viewer is always left wondering “how do I buy Watson?”
IBM is clearly focused on the enterprise use-cases for Watson, but we wonder what would happen if IBM decided to bring it to the consumer market?
Amazon’s Alexa certainly has the hooks into the massive eCommerce platform of the eTailer, and Apple is rumored to be bringing a Digital Personal Assistant to the marketplace. But IBM . . . hmmmm.
Of course, we’d want it just so we could say “My dear Watson, could you fetch me the weather?”
IBM has invested billions of dollars in its Watson business unit, created at the start of 2014, which now employs an estimated 10,000 workers. Its big-ticket marketing push includes clever television ads that feature Watson trading quips with famous people like Serena Williams and Bob Dylan. And Watson, after a slow start, has shown its mettle by assisting in daunting tasks like diagnosing cancer.
Source: IBM Is Counting on Its Bet on Watson, and Paying Big Money for It – The New York Times
