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IBM to acquire Confluent

(www.confluent.io)
443 points abd12 | 1 comments | 08 Dec 25 13:43 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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notepad0x90 ◴[08 Dec 25 15:01 UTC] No.46192971[source]▶
This is so fascinating to me. I mean how IBM keeps taking over other companies, but they consistently deliver low quality/bottom-tier services and products. Why do they keep doing the same thing again and again? How are they generating actual revenue this way?

Ok, so does anyone remember 'Watson'? It was the chatgpt before chatgpt. they built it in house. Why didn't they compete with OpenAI like Google and Anthropic are doing, with in-house tools? They have a mature PowerPC (Power9+? now?)setup, lots of talent to make ML/LLMs work and lots of existing investment in datacenters and getting GPU-intense workloads going.

I don't disagree that this acquisition is good strategy, I'm just fascinated (Schadenfreude?) to witness the demise of confluent now. I think economists should study this, it might help avert larger problems.

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moorow ◴[09 Dec 25 00:35 UTC] No.46199797[source]▶
Watson was a marketing exercise designed to sell a bunch of disconnected text and image processing libraries pulled together by consulting services. It did not function as advertised.

At one point we worked with a large energy company that was basically sold something LLM-like (large-scale indexing and searching/querying of documents) in 2016 or so. IBM had a team of 90 people doing full-time data ingestion for something like 26,000 documents. We got asked to do a counter-product in two weeks, which was literally just a TF-IDF search and some smarts around ingesting different types of documents. Both solutions performed approximately equally, except one cost something in the order of $185m and one cost $40k. Watson continued running for about a year until an external data science contractor realised they could query Watson for highly confidential board meeting notes, and it would provide full previews into the documents. The project was shuttered shortly after.

Alas, nobody gets fired for hiring IBM.

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1. tecleandor ◴[09 Dec 25 09:52 UTC] No.46203159[source]▶
Yep, and I think they've already used the Watson brand for a good bunch of different technologies, and most if them have been retired for lack of success. In fact, seems like a couple weeks ago they've sold a good chunk of Watson Healthcare to private equity [0]. Edit: When I talk about the lack of success, I talk not only about market success, but the usefulness of the product.

Until 3/4 years go I was in healthcare for 15 years, a good bunch of them being partners with IBM in radiology imaging solutions. I've been in their IBM La Gaude (former) research/presentations lab a couple times and I've seen a lot of their Watson product come and go, without much success. I have to say that I've seen a couple that were very interesting, but were mostly statistical, with no AI/LLM/... involvement.

And don't talk me about Softlayer/Bluemix. Or their private cloud racks that I cannot even remember their name...

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  0: https://pharmaphorum.com/news/ibm-sells-off-large-parts-of-watson-health-business