IBM's Watson is about the level of research that Google or Microsoft do in their regular research labs - i.e., it definitely has a longer-term scope, and it's reasonable to expect that investments in this area will pay off in the next 10-15 years rather than 2-3 years as with normal product development.
It is not blue-sky research, though: it's pretty clear what the value proposition is, who the (potential) customers are, etc.; IBM just put on the publicity upfront with their "winning Jeopardy!" grand challenge to put themselves on the map in a space that is currently dominated by small boutique companies and a very limited numbers of bigger players such as Thomson-Reuters and (partly) Nuance.
Which means that IBM will have an easier time selling to existing enterprise customers who want to get in on this "big data" thing using text analytics (and, frankly, it's also good advertising for their existing data analytics business).
As someone who dwells in AI/Machine Learning for a living, let me tell you: Watson is the most extreme blue sky research out there. It happens to have a customer base that intersects with IBM's current base. Why should this be a diminishing factor?
Google's blue sky research is also ultimately for customers. IBM is good at actually selling its research as products. No company does anything for truly altruistic reasons. If so, Google would be spending billions of particle accelerators.
> Watson is the most extreme blue sky research out there
Do you mean it is the most blue sky research being done in the field of AI by large companies? Even if it was closest to blue sky research being done in machine learning by large tech companies, that really doesn't automatically mean that it is blue sky research.
> It happens to have a customer base that intersects with IBM's current base
The definition of blue sky research is "research without any clear path to a product". It isn't diminishing the importance of research to say that it is blue sky (in fact many people would argue the opposite). Watson was already being touted for an actual product launch by the time that it was on Jeopardy.
I don't know that Google has too much blue sky research itself. I guess maybe something that Kurzweil is up to, have they released anything about him?
I guess probably anything that Hinton was hired for which is more fundamental neural network research, maybe the cat recognizing neural network research they did on youtube video?
It is not blue-sky research, though: it's pretty clear what the value proposition is, who the (potential) customers are, etc.; IBM just put on the publicity upfront with their "winning Jeopardy!" grand challenge to put themselves on the map in a space that is currently dominated by small boutique companies and a very limited numbers of bigger players such as Thomson-Reuters and (partly) Nuance.
Which means that IBM will have an easier time selling to existing enterprise customers who want to get in on this "big data" thing using text analytics (and, frankly, it's also good advertising for their existing data analytics business).