Submitted 8 months ago by L4s@lemmy.world [bot] to technology@lemmy.world
IBM selling The Weather Channel and the rest of its weather business::IBM will sell The Weather Company to Francisco Partners, a tech-focused private equity firm, for an undisclosed sum, it announced Tuesday.
Why on earth did IBM buy the weather channel?
Data, probably.
A good way to get GPS data. You “need” gps if you want your phone to show “weather near you”
Weather that is a good decision or not remains to be seen
What is your forecast about it?
Hazy.
I used to love Weather Underground but stopped using it once The Weather Channel took over but crazy that IBM own that, what an odd acquisition.
I still use it, mostly because I’ve been using them for nearly two decades and they’ve been the most consistently accurate in forecasting for my area.
But since the IBM acquisition, the app has been so slow to load.
I used to love the WU app, it was beautiful and accurate. A few years ago I started noticing more and more puzzling changes, before I realized IBM had purchased them. They ruined an incredible app. Seems like they just outsourced development to lowest international bidder.
Please don’t make Weather Underground shitty. It’s the only weather website that gives accurate information around here.
Hate to tell you this, but it’s been shitty since the NEXRAD feeds broke and they never bothered to fix ‘em.
Maybe for you, but all the other weather websites I’ve tried are wrong. Even DarkSky was wrong half the time. It said sunny skies when we were in the middle of a blizzard once. I don’t know, maybe there’s something weird about where I am.
They’ve been shitty since TWC bought them. Maybe a little before when they killed their old web interface which was informative and fast and replaced it with a new design that was difficult to read information, and worst of all, slow as fuck. That’s about when I stopped subscribing.
Same firm that acquired LogMeIn (LastPass) and MyFitnessPal–and after those acquisitions both services quickly moved to worsen the free tiers of services in favor of their paid subscription models.
That’s incredible. Both of those apps INSTANTLY became so much worse after they were bought out.
plus ça change with software disaster capitalism as always
there’ll always be another app to ruin to make a quick buck
LogMeIn has way more free offerings now than just a couple of years ago. Source: used to work at LogMeIn. You are talking out of your ass.
Today I learned that IBM is still a major thing
IBM will still sell you a brand new, updated mainframe in 2023.
They’re also in the open source software space (IBM owns Red Hat, a software company that has a lot of projects for Linux. Red Hat has their own Linux distro too)
Brah…
I knew they were a thing because I run into them in IT from time to time… but had no idea they owned the weather channel. Wild.
I work with their iseries servers daily, they are very much still a thing
Makes sense. Now they can focus more on their core business. Google recently sold it’s domain registry lol
I think it’s fair to look at IBM with a more cynical eye. Historically it’s been “acquire, way you’ll make no changes, wait a bit, make changes that piss off 80% of your customer base.” Somewhere in there is a “reduce customer service effectiveness” step that is distinct from “make changes.”
After that it’s either “sell it off to the highest bidder” or “keep at it because who else are the customers gonna use?”
I hear this a lot, but every company I’ve been a part of that did it seemed to be a bad idea. If a division makes money, the only reason to sell is because you believe the investment in that division can be used to make more money (for less). Getting rid of a profitable entity is usually greed based.
It’s corporate-speak that means nothing. The same company “focused on it’s core business” today will buy something unrelated sometime later and say it’s “poised for growth in a growing market”.
LEDZeppelin@lemmy.world 8 months ago
In before a fascist wannabe billionaire buys the weather channel just to destroy any credibility it has and hijack the climate change debate. Even change the name of weather channel to something like “Y”.
Let the enshittification begin.
Snowyday@startrek.website 8 months ago
You reminded me of this story from 2018 when the Trump team tried to put someone in charge of government weather data so that they could shutdown free public access, allowing private companies to use it and commercialize it
“ One particularly alarming thread explored in Lewis’s reporting follows the ongoing efforts of Barry Myers, the chief executive of AccuWeather and Trump’s pick to run the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, to privatize the agency’s practice of collecting and analyzing data that helps generate weather warnings meant to keep all of us, and not just those who can pay for it, safe.”
vulture.com/…/the-coming-storm-michael-lewis-audi…
qz.com/…/michael-lewis-audiobook-the-coming-storm…
cheese_greater@lemmy.world 8 months ago
God he sucks. Why don’t we do private firefighters and police while we’re at it.
PrincessLeiasCat@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
Steve Bannon is sadly already ahead of you:
washingtonpost.com/…/weathernation-real-americas-…
If paywall:
web.archive.org/…/weathernation-real-americas-voi…
Buelldozer@lemmy.today 8 months ago
I’ve watched WN on a regular basis since 2014. That’s the year I cut cable and WN was the only streaming option I could find. I was also well tired of The Weather Channel and the non-stop drama being pumped out of their studios.
WN may or may not be linked with RAV / Steve Bannon but I simply don’t care. They do weather and that’s it. It’s on when I want (always), gives reasonably accurate predictions, and there is zero political BS or unnecessary drama.
The article has it correct, the WN is basically a modernized version of TWC from two decades ago and that’s all I need / want it to be.
We can talk about GCC, I’m no denier, but I don’t need to be having that conversation while I’m trying to find out what today’s weather is going to be. If refusing to put GCC coverage front and center is wrong then so is every weather app on every smartphone in America is guilty of the same thing.
Mateoto@lemmy.world 8 months ago
This timeline is disturbingly absurd, making it increasingly likely that we could indeed face such a situation.
DoomBot5@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Too late, it’s been shit for years now.