IBM女CEO畅谈超级计算机的未来

    IBM很少对外部公司直接投资，而是选择和风险投资进行合作。这一策略是如何运转的呢？

    我和你分享一下IBM收购时的选择标准以及背后原因，这至关重要。事实上，我们会仔细斟酌这家公司如何整合，通常会花一段时间进行考察。我们会做一个财务路线图。两年前，我们开始了一个历时5年的财务路线图，截止到2015年，IBM总计将在收购方面投入200亿美元。

    所以，我们非常清楚自己的专注领域。我们所进行的收购都是有关联的。它们都与IBM的发展战略密不可分。

    其次，这些收购通常都与知识产权相关。我们在170多个国家运营。如果收购得当，我可以让一个也许只在一两个国家成功的公司实现规模化，这就是IBM能带来的价值所在。

    在年报中，你谈到IBM在收购决策中利用了分析流程。

    的确如此。我们对你公司的方方面面都进行了预测，而结果直接影响到你的业务价值。所以，我们在所有收购中都应用了这一流程。一家公司的评估点多达300到500个。顺便提一句，这种方法在速度上真没有优势。我们自身的研究机构进行了大量分析工作，以预测将对收购影响最大的三至五个独立的因素。

    大家都知道沃森可以参加Jeopardy猜谜游戏。不过，在你看来，沃森还有更大发展前途，对吗？

    是的，沃森还有潜力可挖。第三次科技变革即将来临。最原始的计算机只能计算。第二代计算机可以编程。而现在的沃森具有学习能力。只需要少数指令，沃森就能自主学习更多的知识！

    所以，你看到沃森登台Jeopardy猜谜大赛。它能回答简单的问题而且击败了最好的人类选手。现在，我们让沃森尝试医疗工作。我们的合作伙伴包括斯隆凯特林纪念医院（Memorial Sloan Kettering）、马里兰安德森中心（MD Anderson）和哥伦比亚大学（Columbia）等全球顶级医疗机构。

    对沃森而言，医疗是个收益极高的行业。风险投资也许也能加入其中？例如人机交互和某些细分医疗市场。

    Instead of making direct investments in companies, you guys work closely with the VC company. How does your strategy work?

    Let me share with you kind of what we look for and why when we look at an acquisition, because it's a vital piece. In fact, it's so important to how we think of remaking the company, we actually commit over a period of time. We do something called a roadmap, it's a financial roadmap. And the five-year roadmap that started a couple of years ago ends in 2015. We've said we'll acquire $20 billion of companies.

    So, we're pretty clear about what are the areas I talked about some that we're focused in. So where we'll do acquisitions, they're adjacent. They'll always cluster around strategic areas.

    The second, they'll typically always be intellectual property. I've got a distribution system that goes to 170 countries. If I acquire properly, you know, you may be successful in one or two countries, or one place; I can scale, and that's part of the value that IBM brings.

    In your Annual Report, you talk about an analytics process that you use for acquiring.

    Yes. So, every part of your business will change based on what I consider predictive analytics of the future. So, we did this for all of our acquisitions. We used to look at 300 to 500 things on every acquisition. Okay, well, that wasn't necessarily good for speed, by the way. We did a lot of work with our own Research group on the analytics to be able to predict three to five factors individually by acquisition that are going to make the biggest difference.

    Ginni, for many of us, Watson is that Jeopardy! Game; but when you think of Watson it's a much bigger thought, right?

    Yes, she has done way more than that! It's about the coming of a third area of technology, right? You know, the original systems counted things. The next set of things were programmable. This thing learns, right? You give it very little instruction and then the more information it has, the more it learns.

    So, since the time that you would have seen it on Jeopardy! when it could answer simple questions and it beat the best humans out there, we put it to work for medicine. And we have been working with Memorial Sloan Kettering, MD Anderson, Columbia, some of the finest institutions in this world.

    Medicine is one high-value area for Watson. Might there be a role for venture capital there? There might be, in areas such as interfaces and certain specialized areas.