IBM to Announce More Powerful Watson via the Internet - NYTimes.com

I suspect the AWS team is quietly elated to see these moves by IBM, as they help to legitimize and accelerate the enterprise shift to commodity cloud computing and will also likely accelerate the decline of IBM's traditional enterprise computing business -- e.g., if you ran an enterprise IT group that just paid $bazillions for an on-premises Watson deployment, wouldn't you be looking for a refund right about now?

"While revenues of Amazon’s cloud business are still small enough that the company does not have to disclose them, Amazon officials say Jeff Bezos, the company’s chief executive, believes A.W.S. could eventually dwarf Amazon’s businesses in books and merchandise, enterprises with $51 billion in revenue. This year, Gartner calculated that A.W.S. had five times the computing power of 14 other cloud computing companies, including IBM, combined.
Since then, IBM has spent an estimated $2 billion to acquire a cloud company called SoftLayer and has reconfigured Watson as a cloud product. It also hired buses that drove around the A.W.S. conference in Las Vegas, sporting ads that said they showed its superiority in cloud computing."

IBM to Announce More Powerful Watson via the Internet - NYTimes.com