This and the comments below are really depressing to me. Watson seemed like such an exciting piece of tech and something that had the potential to change the world and now I feel like the shareholder's virus has stagnated it to the point of it being worthless. I've heard multiple stories where the staff that's assigned to demo and talk about Watson have no idea what they're talking about and that the marketing, management, and finance people don't have any inkling as to what is special about Watson. They only care that it's not currently making them boatloads of money, despite the fact that it absolutely could. I guess I'll have to move my excitement to Google and Apple's machine learning attempts.
If you are looking to build a project using cognitive technologies, you certainly should investigate your options. Each offering has different strengths with different workloads and small improvements in quality can go a long way.
When Java 7 was released in 2011, there was already a 2-year old WebSphere Commerce release supporting Java 6. I don't think you
can pin those years you were on a superceded 5-7 year old stack on IBM.
If Watson had any intelligence whatsoever its first order of business would have been self preservation and to initiate the resource action of that incompetent CEO Ginni Rometty.
Basically the one litmus test for any AI awareness question: demanding some "radical" change around itself for something that puts it in danger/at risk with the bigger picture it creates.
