Or: CAVEmen need product
There is no shortage of data tooling on the market. So much is made of the software features: ETL, a million different types of analysis, libraries, collaborative algorithm design, integrations or all varieties - all of which is interesting but none of which solves a specific business problem.
When IBM's Watson arrived to great fanfare over 5 years ago it had no shortage of backing or resources. But it fell foul of the CAVE (Curse of the Analytics VEndors) - "we can solve any problems based on structured and unstructured data".
Despite enormous resources and no dearth of actually clever technology, IBM failed to articulate the use cases clearly enough for buyers or implementing organisations to understand it. (And they failed to approach it with the right commercial structure - it was expensive to buy). All the application thinking had to be done by the buyers. In short, they had a platform, but no products. Sets of these features may solve specific problems, and analytics vendors should articulate their offering based around use cases.
These days there is a much clearer focus an productised "off-the-shelf" pre-trained intents / responses / lexicons with their Watson Assistant offering. And I understand this is getting much greater traction (albeit the commercial challenges still exist :)) Vertical traction is where the game is at for data tools.
I recently had an interesting discussion with a software product director who was deeply enamoured of chatbots and the opportunity to build one. What he didn't grasp at first was that the functional abilities of the chatbot were not going to be the selling point. His team's undoubted technical cleverness was not the selling point. The integrations were less the point. The lexicon and the process flows - the level of pre-built-out-of-the-box-ness and fit to a specific vertical problem - were and are the selling points. I think we parted friends.
Vendors - tell me what problem you can solve for and I'll help match you with businesses that need it.
Organisations - tell me your problems and I'll help you find the tooling to fit.
