You know, $100m actually seems pretty good for something so obscure and weird.
IBM Chief Executive Virginia “Ginni” Rometty has told executives she hopes Watson will generate $10 billion in annual revenue within 10 years, according to an October 2013 conference-call transcript reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. She set that target after the executive in charge of Watson said its business plan would bring in $1 billion of revenue a year by 2018. That would make Watson the fastest IBM business unit to reach the $1 billion milestone. But Watson had total revenue of less than $100 million as of late October, according to the transcript. One of its first big projects, with the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, was “in a ditch” in early 2013, said Manoj Saxena, the executive overseeing Watson.
IBM’s revenue targets seem pretty high. It’d be handy to compare them against iOS-world (here’s the software portion from Horace), which is considered an insanely high growth technology that came from nowhere. Once Her posts enough box-office numbers, that’d be a good, humorous comp too (the AI movie is up to $3.7m after being released just under a month ago).