IBM To Sell Weather Business - Slashdot

Posted by msmash

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  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:

    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 wa

    • get ready for an other fee fight with cable over t

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

  • Re:

    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.

  • Re:

    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 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.

  • Re:

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

• >...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".

• 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.
• 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:

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

• 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?

• 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.

  • 1 hidden comment

• 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]

  • Re:

    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.