Everything will make sense when you realize that IBM is a consulting company. They don't care about building great products. In fact building self-serve products will directly take away from their consulting revenue. They instead need to be good at marketing and selling their services. Watson was exactly that - a marketing demo that got them in the news cycle and helped them sell a giant wave of contracts under a single brand to unsuspecting CIOs of legacy non-tech companies. Every acquisition helps with this goal. Red Hat - locking companies into licenses and support contracts for the OS. HashiCorp & Confluent - locking companies into support contracts for their cloud infra.

>> Ok, so does anyone remember 'Watson'? [...] Why didn't they compete with OpenAI like Google and Anthropic are doing, with in-house tools?

> Everything will make sense when you realize that IBM is a consulting company.

This and.

The 'and' being that consulting companies, in their DNA, build solutions for their customers.

Which is a very different business than building products for all users.

Not least because the former is guided by understanding a customer's requirements, while the later is having a strong intuition (backed up by market fit) about what all users want.

I'm pretty sure there might not be a full end user capable (in the sense of design-build-iterate) product team in IBM at this point.

Mostly because I don't think they've any middle/upper management that can think that way. They've got the engineers!

The service part you are likely referring to is now Kyldryl, a separate company. IBM now focus on software and cloud. There are still services but are much less prominent.