IBM Watson Workspace

» see workspace.ibm.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Watson Workspace was sold to the people who sign enterprise software contracts, during the two years when every vendor on earth was shipping a Slack competitor. I have never been in that buying conversation. The closest I come is that in Turkey the IBM name meant mainframes and Lotus Notes inside banks, which is a different IBM from the one that announced this.

It appeared in preview at IBM World of Watson on 25 October 2016. The pitch was team chat with the Watson brand sitting on top of it. Watson would read the channel and tell you both what you had missed and which promises were buried in it, so that a long thread became a short list.

It ran for about two years across a free tier and two paid ones. On 16 January 2019 IBM told customers it was stopping, and on 28 February the service went dark. Users had until late March to download their conversations before the whole thing was decommissioned.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ watson on top ~

The product's one real idea was that a work chat room is mostly waste, and that a machine ought to be the thing reading it. IBM called the summaries Moments. You came back from two days away, opened a channel with four hundred messages in it, and got a digest instead of a scroll.

The idea was correct. Every chat tool now ships a version of it, and the versions that shipped from 2024 onward actually work, because the models underneath them got good enough to be trusted with a paragraph. In 2017 the summary was the sort of feature you tried twice and then stopped opening.

~ why nobody came ~

Slack already had the developers, and Microsoft put Teams inside a license that companies were paying for anyway. Watson Workspace arrived with a brand that in 2016 mostly meant winning at Jeopardy, which was not enough to move a team off a tool that already worked for them.

IBM's own wording in January 2019 is worth keeping, because it is unusually plain for a shutdown memo. There was no question the product was innovative and agile, it said, and it had not resonated with clients or obtained the traction in the marketplace necessary for IBM to continue forward with the service. That is not a product that failed to work. That is a product nobody wanted.

~ what ibm sold first ~

What makes this one strange is the calendar around it. In December 2018, one month before the Workspace memo, IBM announced that it was selling its Notes and Domino portfolio, Sametime included, to HCL for 1.8 billion dollars. So inside about four weeks the company sold off the collaboration software people were actually using, and then switched off the collaboration software it had built to replace it. IBM kept the Watson brand and left the category.

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