Short paper: More than the end to information overflow: How IBM Watson will turn upside down our view on information appliances

In early 2011, the IBM computing system "Watson" competed against the world\´s best Jeopardy champions - and won. This event marked a year-long research effort in raising the reliability of QA systems. We consider Watson as a new, unprecedented category of information processing system and that it might become a tipping point for a new way to exploit unstructured data in information-rich environments. Thus, we ask how information appliances will change if they will adapt capabilities that were introduced by Watson. We categorize information appliance capabilities to the extent that they reflect different levels of human thinking. We show how those relate to the design information appliances in data-driven working environments. Finally, we provide three possible consequences that might unfold if Watson-technology will gradually trickle down to commodity information appliances.