It's very hard to find a viable business model in machine learning or AI tools and platforms at the moment: the size of the market is small, and most money is being made by the end users. As a result companies who could get value from AI want to own it themselves (to keep all of this money themselves). It's a little bit like everyone wanting to own their own data center full of servers in 1999; at some point it will seem silly, but it's hard to sell against because it's accepted wisdom.
Doing services is a reasonable response to that market dynamic, although they certainly had a product vision too.
Without knowing any of the details, I'd say they can be proud of what was accomplished and how they managed their exit:
1. From what I've heard, some of the work they did in the medical domain really did help save lives or make them better
2. They probably returned the capital to their investors and kept most of their employees
3. They didn't get bought by a company that would be horrible to work for or is in terminal decline
Credit where it's due: they entered a rough market and managed it well.
Metamind was always a services company. I may be wrong but they don't seem to have any product. They were going after contracts north of $250K for two month projects.
May be there is not much dough in consulting market.
Consulting doesn't scale as well, because you need people to do the work. In theory, with an product, you only need people to sell it. The cost of selling software is expensive, but still much less than the cost of delivery consulting.
MetaMind would have been able to raise any amount of money they wanted. Any sensible VC knows that Richard Socher is as close to a sure bet as it is possible to get.
"For unpaid web users, MetaMind's products will be discontinued on May 4. For our monthly recurring users, MetaMind's products will be discontinued on June 4."
As usual, folks that make breakthroughs in science have a hard time commercializing their tech. In this case, the team behind Metamind will make off a lot better than William Shockley did, though this definitely seems like an acquihire.
"With MetaMind and Salesforce coming together, we'll be able to offer customers real AI solutions with breakthrough capabilities that further automate and personalize customer support, marketing automation, and many other business processes."
They want conversational AI for phone support, cold calling, etc.
There is a lot more than that - just reading case filed to understand what the request is about is tough. There are many ways humans can be augmented by modest AI. SFDC has so many products within their various clouds where even modest, but accurate classification could be a gold mine.
Personally, I think we are fairly far away from fully conversant customer support that is fully automated, yet sounds human enough. Most people today do not yet like talking to machines.
Doing services is a reasonable response to that market dynamic, although they certainly had a product vision too.
Without knowing any of the details, I'd say they can be proud of what was accomplished and how they managed their exit: 1. From what I've heard, some of the work they did in the medical domain really did help save lives or make them better 2. They probably returned the capital to their investors and kept most of their employees 3. They didn't get bought by a company that would be horrible to work for or is in terminal decline
Credit where it's due: they entered a rough market and managed it well.