Final Jeopardy (Alexandra Cooper Mysteries) - Linda Fairstein [46]
What’s more, a big switch had occurred since the 1990s. It used to be that the most advanced machinery was found at work. Children whose parents went to offices would sometimes get a chance to play with the adding machines there, along with the intercoms, fancy photocopiers, and phones with illuminated buttons for five or six different lines. But at the dawn of the new century, the office appeared to lose its grip on cool technology. Now people often had snazzier gadgets at home, and in their pockets, than at work. Companies like Apple and Google targeted consumers and infused technology with fun, zip, even desire. Tech companies that served the business market, by contrast—Oracle, Germany’s SAP, Cisco, and IBM—tended to stress the boring stuff: reliability, efficiency, and security. They were valuable qualities, to be sure, but deadening for a brand. IBM needed some sizzle. It was competing for both investors and brainpower with the likes of Google, Apple, Facebook—even the movie studio Pixar. It had to establish itself in the popular imagination as a company that took risks and was engaged in changing the world with bleeding-edge technology. The Jeopardy challenge, with this talking IBM machine on national television matching wits with game-show luminaries, was the branding opportunity of the decade. The name had to be good.
Was THINQ the right choice, or perhaps THINQER? How about Exaqt or Ace? Working with the New York branding firm VSA Partners, IBM came up with dozens of candidates. The goals, according to a VSA summary, were to emphasize the business value of the technology, create a close tie to IBM, steer clear of names that were “too cute,” and lead the audience “to root for the machine.”
One group of names had strong links to IBM. Deep Logic evoked Deep Blue, the computer that mastered chess. System/QA recalled the iconic mainframe System/360. Other names stressed intelligence. Qwiz, for example, blended “Q,” for question, with “wiz” to suggest that the technology had revolutionized search. The pronunciation—quiz—fit the game show theme. Another choice, nSight, referred to “n,” representing infinite possibilities. And EureQA blended “eureka” with the Q-A for question-answering. Another candidate “Mined,” pointed to the machine’s datamining prowess.
On the day of the naming meeting, December 12, all of the logic behind the various choices was promptly ignored as people focused on the simplest of names in the category associated with IBM’s brand: Watson. “It just felt so right,” said Syken. “As soon as it came up, we knew we had it.” Watson invoked IBM’s founder. This was especially fitting since Thomas J. Watson had also established the research division, originally on the campus of Columbia University, in 1945. The Watson name was also a nod to the companion and chronicler of Sherlock Holmes, the brilliant fictional sleuth. In those stories, of course, Dr. Watson was clearly the lesser of the two intellects. But considering public apprehension about all-knowing machines, maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea to name a question-answering computer after an earnest and plodding assistant.
The next issue was what Watson would look like. For this, IBM brought in its lead advertising agency, Ogilvy & Mather. With offices on Manhattan’s sprawling far West Side, where it shared a block with a Toyota dealership and a car wash, Ogilvy had been IBM’s primary agency since Louis Gerstner arrived at the company. Its creative minds were paid to think big, and in the first few meetings, they did. They considered creating an enormous wall of Watson. It would take over much of the Jeopardy set, perhaps in the form of a projected brain, with neurons firing, or maybe a virtual