"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?

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

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.

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/

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?

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

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

Agentic AI really is changing things. I've had a complete change of heart about it. It's good enough now to boost productivity MASSIVELY for devs.

You expect somebody to be heavily invested currently and also completely openly pessimistic about it?

I’m not close enough to it to make any meaningful comments. I just see the name pop up fairly regularly. It is possible that some of it is WatsonX and everyone just says Watson for brevity.

One big ones used heavily is Watson AIOps. I think we started moving to it before the big LLM boom. My usage is very tangential, to the point where I don’t even know what the AI features are.

Baked into a lot a Red Hat products including Ansible and RHEL. Not that directly involved any longer. Probably read up on watsonx.ai.

IBM did a lot of pretty fragmented and often PR-adjacent work. And getting into some industry-specific (e.g. healthcare) things that didn't really work out. But my understanding is that it's better standardized and embedded in products these days.

Pretty sure they made all their money fighting the paperwork explosion.

They are in the business of international machinations.

:) As much I love ragging on ridiculous HN comments, I think this one is rooted in some sensibility.

IBM doesn’t majorly market themselves to consumers. The overwhelming majority of devs just aren’t part of the demographic IBM intends to capture.

It’s no surprise people don’t know what they do. To be honest it does surprise me they’re such a strongly successful company, as little as I’ve knowingly encountered them over my career.