LAS VEGAS – IBM has the capability to compete with Google or Microsoft’s Bing in the search arena, but the company has no interest in moving in that direction despite the strong showing IBM made in answering a variety of complex questions with its Watson supercomputer in a Jeopardy! quiz show competition.
At IBM’s Pulse 2011 systems and service management show here, Steve Mills, IBM’s senior vice president and group executive of software and systems, told a still very Watson-hungry press corps that although Watson demonstrated that it could have a much better success rate at getting to a specifically correct answer to a complex query than a Google search, IBM has other plans for the technology and its natural language processing and DeepQA (Question Answering) technology.
“We learned a lot about what it would take to make it [Watson] commercial,” Mills said. “We’ve capitalized on many, many decades of accumulated computer science.”
At IBM’s Pulse 2011, a high-ranking IBM exec says IBM’s Watson technology can do what Google does, but IBM has no interest in the traditional search business model.
