IBM sells off cloud business – yes, we mean Weather.com Weather.com is an IBM business no more. Big Blue has sold off the unit to private equity. While the terms of the deal haven’t been disclosed, IBM on Tuesday said the vast majority of The Weather Company’s assets – including its mobile and web properties; its forecasting services for media and aviation industries; and its …
Weather.com has been generally unusable for decades now.
All I wanted to do was print a week-long forecast for the high school marching band director for our July 1997 trip to Boston (from Minnesota).
Trying to print that graphic-heavy and ad-laden crap hung the computer and resulted in a figurative ream of literal garbage from the printer.
(Note the year -- we couldn't check a smartphone app on the road. We were packing the motorcoaches (fancy buses), so I was at the school already and using their resources. Maybe at home I would have had a fighting chance, maybe retyping the forecast as a simple Word document, text only.)
Private Equity is where businesses go to die. Presumably IBM found that it wasn't profitable after all. So they dumped it on a PE (leveraged buyout) firm who will "improve efficiency" by firing much of the staff, especially the experienced but higher-paid ones who understand, say, weather. And who will engage in deeper surveillance with their app, which is a home screen widget on many phones. And they'll discover that they can save on computing by moving to a, uh, less-granular geographic and temporal model. So it won't be as accurate as NOAA, but they'll still be surveilling you via those Android apps.
This must be quite concerning. Two business units, set up or bought to have Watson technologies applied to them (medical and weather), now sold on because IBM obviously didn't like the results they were generating.
Tell me. What is IBM's expected direction now?
They appear to have ditched hardware (with a couple of hang-ons that still seem to be profitable, but which don't appear to be strategic), split off the majority of their consulting arm, and now are selling off what was supposed to the the golden goose a while back. On top of this, they've made moves to make Red Hat less popular after splurging billions on it, and they really aren't a major player in Cloud.
Is there any real hope that WatsonX will be any better? The current internal competition to generate innovative WatsonX ideas almost seems a desperate attempt to get the staff (who would really prefer to get their current assignments completed) onboard, while trying to identify ideas to sell.
While there is some forcasting tech there, the other 2/3 of the business is protectionism, targeted ads, and sensationalism.
IBM improved their technical architecture, not their ethics. Private equity isn't going to fix what's broken now, it's going to break what's working now.
Hopefully we can just fix NOAA and weather.gov before the new owners get their sea legs. As taxpayers we already paid for top notch forecasting, we just need a clean way to view it for free ourselves instead of having a news station read it to us while a rolling banner scrolls across the bottom of the screen selling knock off viagra.
This post has been deleted by its author
Breezy Weather (link) seems to be a reasonable substitute.
You need to add the repo to FDroid, instructions here.
I seemed to recall the Weather app on iOS uses The Weather Channel (aka weather.com) as a source. And that its weather predictions in most of Europe were pretty rubbish. But recently they've been improving so much that I now actually use the app.
This article gave me cause to have a look at their sources again and since iOS 15.2 it seems they've ditched weather.com for a variety of other local forecast sources across the globe.
IBM Watson. Can't even predict what weather it's going to be tomorrow.
I assume you mean lousy, because that's my experience.
Wife and I both have iFruit phones. I use the Weather Channel app, she the built-in weather, and mine always seems more accurate.
(She sometimes uses weather reports from a local TV station via their app, which are better except for ads.)
I've never used Weather.com, so I just went and had a look. It fails to find my UK postcode, and offers me instead the weather report for Charing Cross, which is over 100 miles away.
Oh, it's worse than that. It fails to find any city name I type in and defaults to Charing Cross. $2Bn huh?
I've used Weather Underground (https://www.wunderground.com/) for decades because they have a graph which shows the weather for the next ten days so I don't have to look at a list of numbers and try to figure out the humidity, %POP, temp, etc. As for ads, what ads? My blockers work just fine.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
