back to article Run little spreadsheet, run! IBM's Watson is coming to gobble you up

IBM's Jeopardy! star supercomputer Watson has turned its attention from trivial pursuits to even more mundane pursuits – namely, crunching sales figures for companies. Big Blue on Tuesday announced Watson Analytics, its latest attempt to pimp its "cognitive computing" tech as a cloud service, this time aimed at business …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Terminator

    Judgement day is coming closer

    1. Paul Crawford Silver badge

      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tGO79BtWUI

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Doesn't Watson learn as data is entered? He learned some poor words to use thanks to Urban Dictionary. Why would a company want to "give" IBM all of their data. Will Watson ever forget it or does someone pay some money and ask Watson how a competitor is doing?

    Hmmm, Maybe HP should have used this before they bought Autonomy.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Coffee/keyboard

      I was going to pose the same question

      What if row one of my spreadsheet is /my/ guess at my competitor's sales figures.....will Watson correct them for me?

      You may need a keyboard with 101 escape keys.

    2. Peter Gathercole Silver badge

      Watson is not a single computer any more

      While what we saw on Jeopardy! could clearly be seen as a computer cluster running as a single service, what IBM have now is an analytics application that runs as a fenced cloud service. This means that it runs on just your data, and that data is separated from another companies data, as much as anything is fenced in a cloud service.

      So, if you trust company data separation in the cloud, you're just as safe using the IBM Cognitive Computing service as any other cloud service.

      I'm not saying how safe I feel that is, however...

  3. raving angry loony

    Excellent idea

    Go ahead, business people. Give all your business data and financial information to IBM. I'm sure nobody else will look at it or use it against you. Not that Google doesn't already have big chunks of it already, of course.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      *cough*Salesforce.com*cough* Re: Excellent idea

      People seem quite comfortable giving Salesforce.com their customer and sales data, so...

      1. raving angry loony

        Re: *cough*Salesforce.com*cough* Excellent idea

        Good point, well made. I didn't realize Salesforce didn't allow local servers. Learn something new... etc.

        Amazing what some businesses will trust. And as an American company, they answer to the US State Dept (in a roundabout way), an organization with a documented history of helping American companies no matter what the cost to non-American interests. Wonder how many Russian organizations are using Salesforce these days?

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