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IBM Businesses

IBM To Sell Weather Business (bloomberg.com) 50

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
IBM will sell its weather business to Francisco Partners, which will operate it as a standalone company. From a report: IBM's consumer-facing weather services such as Weather.com and business-oriented offerings will be acquired by the technology-focused private equity firm for an undisclosed sum, it said in a joint statement with Francisco on Tuesday. IBM will retain its sustainability software suite. "Through increased investment and resources from Francisco Partners, The Weather Company will look to move beyond forecasting alone and bring new tools and experiences to users to help them understand how weather impacts all aspects of their lives, starting with health and well-being," the companies said in the statement. IBM has been considering sale of the unit since at least April. The division was acquired in a deal announced in 2015 that included the apps and websites of the Weather Channel and Weather Underground as part of an effort to extend its move into the then-hot Internet of Things market.
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IBM To Sell Weather Business More

IBM To Sell Weather Business

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  • Honestly? Good. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Ever since 2019 when Intellicast merged with Weather Underground (owned by IBM), the Intellicast animated radar images have been twitchy, often failing to update after a certain point in the 24 hour cycle until the next day. That's not useful when you're trying to see how close a storm system actually is. Maybe a new owner can straighten that out, because IBM sure hasn't bothered to.

    • Re:Honestly? Good. (Score:5, Informative)

      by alexgieg ( 948359 ) <alexgieg@gmail.com> on Tuesday August 22, 2023 @09:44AM (#63787760) Homepage

      Maybe a new owner can straighten that out

      Alas, not when the new owner is a private equity. PEs earn money mostly by purchasing a company and increasing its spread, which basically means doing three things:

      a) Increasing prices, slowly but surely, in a "boiling the frog" manner;

      b) Firing everyone who knows what they're doing, and thus are expensive, and hiring in their place a skeleton crew that does the absolute minimum to keep the service alive;

      c) "Vertically integrating" the new service into their "portfolio of companies", or to put it another way, trying to upsell you into their other stuff no matter how much that makes the current service worse.

      If this PE is like all others, prepare for it to become much worse, and to jump ship as soon as possible.

      • get ready for an other fee fight with cable over the weather channel.

      • What you're describing was what IBM was already doing. It's IBM's MO.

        It's going to do the same to Redhat.

        • What you're describing was what IBM was already doing. It's IBM's MO.

          Almost. IBM does this but it also invests in R&D and improvements, so it isn't as bad as a pure PE.

          It's going to do the same to Redhat.

          For comparison, if a PE acquired Redhat today, then in a matter of weeks they'd start doing these:

          a) Fire almost the entire set of first world engineers they have working on it. They'd keep a very tiny set, in the low two-digits, to attend their hugest customers, but with a goal of also firing them eventually.

          b) Completely stop R&D, and also leave all expensive, useless industry associations they could

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dbialac ( 320955 )
      That and possibly libelous is the fact that the "current conditions" that are actually, not actual radar images, are often dangerously off. When you're referencing severe weather events and the storm cloud is indicated to be nowhere near you, you'll take comfort in the fact that the tornado is nowhere near you when in fact it's barreling down at you.

    • The quick loading static images and animations (from the Intellicast days) might not survive this. The complex WUNDERMAP is so ungainly most of the time.

    • I miss intellicast.com, the site just worked. What WU does now with the intellicast radar is just lip service and it is like someone frequently forgets to run the script to create the animated radar animations.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by p51d007 ( 656414 )
      WU & intellicast turned to crap when they merged. I agree! Hope they sort it out.
    • IBM has been running WU further and further into the ground with every passing year. The sale announcement is on par with Microsoft saying they'll no longer update Win10, meaning in both cases, IBM and MS, they'll stop fucking it up even further, because they certainly weren't improving it.

  • Weather Underground (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bradley13 ( 1118935 ) on Tuesday August 22, 2023 @09:13AM (#63787678) Homepage

    I have a weather station attached to Weather Underground. It always seemed like IBM ought to be able to do more with thousands of weather stations reporting free info to them. Heck, I'd be happy if they would just fix simple things like their F/C logic - why do they default to displaying Fahrenheit in Europe?

    So now a private equity firm. Great. Most likely they will try to monetize by charging station owners - the ones providing them with a free station network.

    • So now a private equity firm. Great.

      One reads "private equity X acquired Y", one knows Y is going to become garbage in 4... 3... 2...

    • Have you seen where people put these things? They install near parking lots (always reads hotter), near river banks and marsh (always reads humid), and that is when they simply aren't just way out of calibration. Maybe for a national average it works but for local weather you might as well roll some dice.

      The National Weather Service in the US exists and really, there is no competition. The weather channel is just another entertainment channel.

  • >...experiences to users to help them understand how weather impacts all aspects of their lives, starting with health and well-being,

    So it'll be like the local news where you get insightful tips like "It'll be rainy so bring an umbrella" or "It'll be hot so drink water".

  • Starting with health and well-being? (Score:3)

    by The Evil Atheist ( 2484676 ) on Tuesday August 22, 2023 @09:24AM (#63787702)
    You know when tech is selling snake-oil as soon as they start talking about "health" and "well-being". Why does chasing that extra 0.5% of marginally proven benefit attract so many nutters?

    Don't drink alcohol. Don't smoke/vape. Don't take drugs. Eat a varied diet, avoiding too much sugar. Don't sit down so much, exercise regularly if possible. Get some sun, but wear sunscreen on high UV days. Don't drive like a dickhead or think Tesla autopilot is self-driving. Be alert when crossing the street. Get vaccinated. Wear a mask. Wash your hands. Check for lumps.

    If that doesn't work, see a doctor if you haven't already and can afford to. The rest is down to the genetic lottery and the physical lottery which you have no control over.

    You're not going to live an appreciably longer, or an appreciably better, life by wasting so much effort on the 0.5%, least of all tying your health to the fucking weather.

  • I use nothing but NOAA (Score:3)

    by Revek ( 133289 ) on Tuesday August 22, 2023 @09:36AM (#63787732)
    It was rough for a bit after they killed the old flash site but why would you ever use anything but the national weather service in the US?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by GlennC ( 96879 )

      They even have an easy to remember URL. http://weather.gov/ [weather.gov]

    • I used to use weather.gov all the time, but when they did finally replace the old Flash maps, the new version lost some significant features, such as the ability to show rainfall amounts on the map. Also, the new radar maps (like the old maps) aren't able to intuitively scroll or zoom, you have to pan like MapQuest c. 1999. Weather Underground did a much better job, though their maps are still somewhat clunky.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dublin ( 31215 )

      NOAA is OK, but Windy is excellent - and will be the last SaaS subscription I have after purging all the others - it's the only SaaS sub I can recommend without reservation. Windy provides *many* more (and often better) models than NOAA does, with really good visuals, to boot.

      Big Companies almost always wind up destroying the fundamental value underlying their acquisitions. Intellicast legitimately revolutionized high-graphics weather maps and other info and was arguably the first graphically intensive we

  • Typically, you sell off things that don't make money. Why doesn't it make money? In case people haven't noticed, most weather apps used to have forward-looking radar for free. Now you have to pay for it. I guess nobody wants to pay for it and ad revenue isn't enough. Whoever is buying it is going to try everything to recoup their investment which usually means reduction in quality and cutting corners. How much worse can weather apps get?

    • In the US you have the National Weather Service. It provides everything you need for free. Why pay an app to regurgitate the same data?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tepples ( 727027 )

        In case people haven't noticed, most weather apps used to have forward-looking radar for free. Now you have to pay for it.

        In the US you have the National Weather Service. It provides everything you need for free.

        I've put my ZIP code into Weather.gov. Now how do I get to a forward-looking radar product? Or if I don't "need" it, what product serves the same purpose that forward-looking radar serves?

  • Are they selling because they don't want to get blamed for the bad, unpredictable weather, El Nino etc (cue arguments from the climate deniers in 3 2 1 )

    At one stage one of the other owners of the Weather Channel was Bain Capital (Mormon Mitt's investment company) but I don't know if they are still involved.

  • NOAA make the entire weather "business" absurd. (Score:3)

    by couchslug ( 175151 ) on Tuesday August 22, 2023 @11:04AM (#63787970)

    Your taxes pay for critically necessary weather monitoring so why use inferior private services ever?

    Their pages have all the content one could wish for:

    https://forecast.weather.gov/M... [weather.gov]

    • And all without a smidgen of advertising or smarmy "articles" littering up the page. Imagine what the internet would be like today if we'd kept the advertising ban of yore in place.

    • Re:NOAA make the entire weather "business" absurd. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by groobly ( 6155920 ) on Tuesday August 22, 2023 @11:33AM (#63788062)

      But like all govt websites NOAA's UI is awful awful awful.

      WU has the advantage that in areas of high local variablity, like where I live, I can choose station near me for current measurements.

      • If you really want local just put up a temp and humidity gauge on your own property..

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by boskone ( 234014 )

          I think it's fun. I have a weather station at my home and one at my Mom's. Both are internet connected and attached to weather undgeround. They both are in places where the microclimate is often quite different than the official stations 5 miles away, so I like to provide the service.

      • I first saw the NOAA page open on a USAF PC in Ops squadron.
        It was left on the local page (ICAO KSSC) and that was that. Ops and fighter pilots could see all they needed at a glance.

        I do the same unless I'm bored. I'm not there to be entertained, I'm there to glance and go. NOAA has plenty of highly detailed content for those who care and it's easy to get familiar with. What do the commercial alternatives DO that NOAA doesn't?

        Unless you're in a very, very isolated area there's plenty of NOAA coverage in CON

  • Ever snce IBM acquired WU, WU takes forever to start up on my super duper top of the lilne phone. Like a minute. Other weather apps take like 3 seconds. What the HELL is it doing?

  • I loved i.wund.com before they got acquired. It was a simple interface that loaded nearly instantly. The radar animation was janky but loaded quickly. IBM took it over and shut down that

  • Weather.com was good before IBM, then it became a mixed bag. Something tells me it will now turn to straight shit.

    There are alternatives, but every other free service is mixed too in frustrating ways. You can get good radar, but it's like 15 minutes behind. You can get good up-to-the-minute radar, but the forward projections suck. You can get decent overall predictions, but the radar resolution might as well be from the Battle of Britain.
  • I remember they acquired the weather business when I was employed there. Back then it was to research Watson technologies, but I guess the supercomputer didn't make any significant discovery in climate world. I've always thought it was a mistake to get into the weather stuffs. Glad they're selling it now.
  • Before IBM (weather.com) bought Dark Sky, Dark Sky was my favorite weather app and had the best radar forecasts, which are important to me. After Dark Sky disappeared and I assumed its quality would appear in weather.com, I switched to the latter. What a mistake. Weather.com has been very, very slow and much less accurate. Even this morning, at 10AM the 24-hour radar map showed a completely different radar map for 10AM-5PM than the default 7-hour radar map did. Iâ(TM)m not optimistic about a privat

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by JTinMSP ( 136923 )
      Apple bought Dark Sky. Apple killed off the external APIs to Dark Sky. In effect, Apple pushed the world towards IBM and their "weather" products.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dublin ( 31215 )

        Have a look at Windy. I can't speak to their APIs, but the web and app versions are both excellent in thier own interfaces as well as fed by excellent data - some of which would cost a fortune to get elsewhere. It really is one of the most impressive weather apps on the net.

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