[jimmar]

I don't know that I'd trust IBM when they are pitching their own stuff. But if anybody has experience with the difficulty of making money off of cutting-edge technology, it's IBM. They were early to AI, early to cloud computing, etc. And yet they failed to capture market share and grow revenues sufficiently in those areas. Cool tech demos (like the Watson Jeopardy) mimic some AI demos today (6-second videos). Yeah, it's cool tech, but what's the product that people will actually pay money for?

I attended a presentation in the early 2000s where an IBM executive was trying to explain to us how big software-as-a-service was going to be and how IBM was investing hundreds of millions into it. IBM was right, but it just wasn't IBM's software that people ended up buying.

[stingraycharles]

Xerox was also famously early with a lot of things but failed to create proper products out of it.

Google falls somewhere in the middle. They have great R&D but just can’t make products. It took OpenAI to show them how to do it, and the managed to catch up fast.

[SamvitJ]

"They have great R&D but just can’t make products"

Is this just something you repeat without thinking? It seems to be a popular sentiment here on Hacker News, but really makes no sense if you think about it.

Products: Search, Gmail, Chrome, Android, Maps, Youtube, Workspace (Drive, Docs, Sheets, Calendar, Meet), Photos, Play Store, Chromebook, Pixel ... not to mention Cloud, Waymo, and Gemini ...

So many widely adopted products. How many other companies can say the same?

What am I missing?

[eellpp]

Google had less incentive. Their incentive was to keep API bottled up and in brewing as long as possible so their existing moats in search, YouTube can extend in other areas. With openai they are forced to compete or perish.

Even with gemini in lead, its only till they extinguish or make chatgpt unviable for openai as business. OpenAI may loose the talent war and cease to be leader in this domain against google (or Facebook) , but in longer term their incentive to break fresh aligns with average user requirements . With Chinese AI just behind, may be google/microsoft have no choice either

[mikepurvis]

Google was especially well positioned to catch up because they have a lot of the hardware and expertise and they have a captive audience in gsuite and at google.com.

[internet_points]

The original statistical machine translation models of the 90's, which were still used well into the 2010's, were famously called the "IBM models" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_alignment_models These were not just cool tech demos, they were the state of the art for decades. (They just didn't make IBM any money.)

[nish__]

Neither cloud computing nor AI are good long term businesses. Yes, there's money to be made in the short term but only because there's more demand than there is supply for high-end chips and bleeding edge AI models. Once supply chains catch up and the open models get good enough to do everything we need them for, everyone will be able to afford to compute on prem. It could be well over a decade before that happens but it won't be forever.

[echelon]

This is my thinking too. Local is going to be huge when it happens.

Once we have sufficient VRAM and speed, we're going to fly - not run - to a whole new class of applications. Things that just don't work in the cloud for one reason or another.

- The true power of a "World Model" like Genie 2 will never happen with latency. That will have to run locally. We want local AI game engines [1] we can step into like holodecks.

- Nobody is going to want to call OpenAI or Grok with personal matters. People want a local AI "girlfriend" or whatever. That shit needs to stay private for people.

- Image and video gen is a never ending cycle of "Our Content Filters Have Detected Harmful Prompts". You can't make totally safe for work images or videos of kids, men in atypical roles (men with their children = abuse!), women in atypical roles (woman in danger = abuse!), LGBT relationships, world leaders, celebs, popular IPs, etc. Everyone I interact with constantly brings these issues up.

- Robots will have to be local. You can't solve 6+DOF, dance routines, cutting food, etc. with 500ms latency.

- The RIAA is going door to door taking down each major music AI service. Suno just recently had two Billboard chart-topping songs? Congrats - now the RIAA lawyers have sued them and reached a settlement. Suno now won't let you download the music you create. They're going to remove the existing models and replace them with "officially licensed" musicians like Katy Perry® and Travis Scott™. You won't retain rights to anything you mix. This totally sucks and music models need to be 100% local and outside of their reach.

[1] Also, you have to see this mind-blowing interactive browser demo from 2022. It still makes my jaw drop: https://madebyoll.in/posts/game_emulation_via_dnn/

[eru]

What you are saying is true. But IBM failing to see a way to make money off a new technology isn't actually news worth updating on in this case?

[mike50]

They were selling software as a service in the IBM 360 days. Relabeling a concept and buying Redhat don't count as investments.

[hollerith]

What is your reason for believing that IBM was selling software as a service in the IBM 360 days?

What hardware did the users of this service use to connect to the service?

[DaiPlusPlus]

> but it just wasn't IBM's software that people ended up buying.

Well, I mean, WebSphere was pretty big at the time; and IBM VisualAge became Eclipse.

And I know there were a bunch of LoB applications built on AS/400 (now called "System i") that had "real" web-frontends (though in practice, they were only suitable for LAN and VPN access, not public web; and were absolutely horrible on the inside, e.g. Progress OpenEdge).

...had IBM kept up the pretense of investment, and offered a real migration path to Java instead of a rewrite, then perhaps today might be slightly different?

[Insanity]

Oh wow I didn’t know Eclipse was an IBM product originally. IDEs have come so far since Eclipse 15 years ago.

And while I’m writing this I just finished up today’s advent of code using vim instead of a “real IDE” haha

[nunez]

Websphere is still big at loads of banks and government agencies, just like Z. They make loads on both!