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.
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.
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.”
https://www.vulture.com/2018/07/the-coming-storm-michael-lewis-audiobook-review.html
God he sucks. Why don’t we do private firefighters and police while we’re at it.
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Steve Bannon is sadly already ahead of you:
The two networks’ shared ownership has alarmed some meteorologists, who say that WeatherNation is helping to legitimize the extreme viewpoints aired on Real America’s Voice, occasionally sharing its forecasts on the political network; at times the networks feature the same advertisers. These critics also argue that in its own coverage, WeatherNation fosters climate change skepticism by shunning any mention of the established links between human-driven climate warming and the disasters the channel covers, thus discouraging viewers from considering the consequences of climate change
If paywall:
Another article with tons of linked sources: https://checkmyads.org/branded/how-proctor-gamble-ended-up-funding-steve-bannons-war-room/
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 sick 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 every weather app on every smartphone in America is guilty of the same thing.
He’ll probably rename it to 🌦️
*Databases crash noises
This timeline is disturbingly absurd, making it increasingly likely that we could indeed face such a situation.
Too late, it’s been shit for years now.
The Weather Channel tv channel isn’t owned by IBM and isn’t part of this deal
Same firm that acquired LogMeIn (LastPass) and MyFitnessPal–and after those acquisitions both MyFitnessPal and LastPass 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
There’s always blood to squeese.
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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.
Maybe they just think you did a bad job…
(That’s a joke)
I don’t mind. but I’m pretty sure they are conflating two entirely different events: one was the almost complete removal of the free tier of the original LogMeIn, which at this point happened probably 10 years ago? LogMeIn (now GoTo) was privatized and sold two-ish years ago, maybe less.
Sorry! I conflated LogMeIn with a specific LogMeIn product, LastPass (Francisco acquired the whole thing but I’m only familiar with LastPass). To clarify, the free tier of LastPass was made less useful following acquisition, particularly with the limitation to a single device.
Wow, that’s a load of crap for sure. Not that it’s entirely unexpected tbh. LastPass was bought for the large userbase and the plan was to figure out later how to monetize them. Lots of hand-waving, little substance. Initially the lastpass teams were beefed up so much they filled all free space in the office. That lasted less than a year (which is around when I left). The embarrassing security incidents started after that. They really fumbled this, overall. Which is a shame, I used to be an early LastPass user, but moved on to 1pw long ago.
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.
Just use the National Weather Service. It is where they get all of their data. They just bundle it up and sell it.
That’s my second weather screen when I’m at a computer.
The thing about weather underground is that it’s the only way to see weather data online from my (and others) personal weather station. As far as I know anyway, not sure if there’s an alternative.
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.
Why on earth did IBM buy the weather channel?
Data, probably.
BM planned to leverage its Watson technology as part of the acquisition, foreseeing its use for weather analytics and predictions. The deal, which closed the following January,[27] does not include the Weather Channel itself, which remained owned by the Bain/Blackstone/NBCUniversal consortium, and entered into a long-term licensing agreement with IBM for use of its weather data and “The Weather Channel” name and branding
wikipedia page for The Weather Channel
A good way to get GPS data. You “need” gps if you want your phone to show “weather near you”
TIL IBM owns the Weather Channel.
Only the mobile app. They don’t own the tv channel.
IBM planned to leverage its Watson technology as part of the acquisition, foreseeing its use for weather analytics and predictions. The deal, which closed the following January,[27] does not include the Weather Channel itself, which remained owned by the Bain/Blackstone/NBCUniversal consortium, and entered into a long-term licensing agreement with IBM for use of its weather data and “The Weather Channel” name and branding
Weather that is a good decision or not remains to be seen
What is your forecast about it?
Hazy.
Hail of a good pun line going on.
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.
I had a similar experience with Dark Sky, but Weather Underground was always great. The weird part of it is that I’m near Chicago, where the NWS office got trashed for their awful handling of the forecast and response to the storms that led to the Plainfield F5 in 1990 - bad radar was often cited as a reason for that response, so NEXRAD especially has been key to NWS’s improvement here.
It’s www.weather.gov/lot for me now.
Oh wow, weather.gov looks really nice these days. It used to be bare bones. I may use it from now on, thanks!
Edit: The only thing I don’t like is I can’t see where it has the current heat index.
Not sure if this is the case for other regions, but it’s right here for me:
Yeah, not there for me. Still worth using overall though.
If only their UI wasn’t so trash I’d only ever use weather.gov
Yeah it’s pretty bare-bones. Pretty much the only site I am aware of that still uses image maps. The other one I like is the College of DuPage Meteorology site, though that gets even more archaic in some places: https://weather.cod.edu/
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.
worst of all, slow as fuck.
So true. Waiting 30 seconds to see the temperature is ridiculous.
It takes all of 2 seconds to open the door. Guess what? The temperature is hot.
Because it’s so easy to crack the door when you’re 20 stories up…
Maybe the Wunderground KDE plugin will be revived now that IBM isn’t the one handing out API keys…
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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)
Which threats users to had their subscription cancelled when they share the source code according to GPL.
Yeah. I agree with ya there, Red Hat screwed over Alma and Rocky with that decision. I can see the utility of those two distros for testing before committing to RHEL.
Plus, if Oracle has room to try to be the “good guys”, you’ve really screwed up
Nobody was “testing” rhel by using Rocky or Alma, they just didn’t want to pay for it. I mean you can test actual rhel for free!
Nah. Deploy Rocky or Alma in mass. Have RHEL for a few machines. When you got a problem, reproduce it in RHEL and call support.
That sounds pretty exploitative to me, and exactly the kind of use case that red hat wouldn’t want to support.
Think about what “bug for bug compatibility” actually means, they’re promising not to make any fixes or contribute to the build in any way!
I agree. It was told by my professor. He said “industry norm”.
We did away with that pesky business failures. Now all corporate are eternal.
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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
Cool, could they sell Redhat to someone not actively evil, and fuck right off now?
Does anyone know of a great alternative weather app?
Windy
I’ve recently switched to Weawow and it’s great! Really high quality widgets and a really powerful notification area feature.
i found SimpleWeather recently https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.thewizrd.simpleweather and like it a lot, though i had to change the default weather provider to get accurate data for my area
Going outside
Doesn’t help me see what the weather will be like in a few hours or days from now, which is the whole point of forecasting.
Pshh, my uncle could feel a storm coming with just a feeling in his bad knee.
So do I just call him or
His hearing goes when a hurricane approaches so I’d send him a Fax
Makes sense. Now they can focus more on their core business. Google recently sold it’s domain registry, I think it might be the same thing.
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?”
It’s a bummer that Google sold it’s registry to
GoDaddySquarespace.EDIT: seems like I remember it incorrectly
They sold it to Squarespace.
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”.
TIL IBM owned the weather app.
If you have The Weather App, the IBM logo is on the splash screen every first launch.
Ah. I guess I just use the one that comes with my iPhone.
But that is where I get all the news I need.
