I'll preface this by saying that my time working with it was while I was working at IBM, so feel free to take this with a grain of salt. In my time since I've worked in a few Data/ML and Security positions, so I do have a basis for comparison with other systems.
From what I saw, the actual language-processing part of it was top-tier. It's just it's a hard problem to come up with a demo for that people will actually respond positively to, hence the Jeopardy stint. It has limited real applications. It's really good at what it does but what it does isn't really widely useful.
Nobody wants to see "We're going to replace all our online help / support chat stuff with Watson" because people find those systems frustrating already, even if it would make things vastly better than some of the alternatives.
So you end up with weird stuff like Chef Watson, Doctor Watson, and so on -- things in areas where an ML model isn't going to replace a human anytime soon.
Then Marketing gets involved and suddenly anything that uses any kind of ML needs to have Watson slapped on it, even if it's not doing any language processing.
Welp, you're downplaying IBM too much. IBM got the product direction right earlier than anyone. Watson is a querying system w/ advanced NLP/IR/KRR capability running on dedicated compute chips, and large corps are more or less following this path. It's just that IBM did it too early and used rather old approaches, which doesn't grow well (thus "spaghetti").
Still, Watson is pretty much the only one in its class. There are good alternatives out there that worked well for many people, but they offer only a subset of Watson's feature set. If an organization need some real bang, Watson is the only option.
From what I saw, the actual language-processing part of it was top-tier. It's just it's a hard problem to come up with a demo for that people will actually respond positively to, hence the Jeopardy stint. It has limited real applications. It's really good at what it does but what it does isn't really widely useful.
Nobody wants to see "We're going to replace all our online help / support chat stuff with Watson" because people find those systems frustrating already, even if it would make things vastly better than some of the alternatives.
So you end up with weird stuff like Chef Watson, Doctor Watson, and so on -- things in areas where an ML model isn't going to replace a human anytime soon.
Then Marketing gets involved and suddenly anything that uses any kind of ML needs to have Watson slapped on it, even if it's not doing any language processing.