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/
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.
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.
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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?
Please don’t make Weather Underground shitty. It’s the only weather website that gives accurate information around here.
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.
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.
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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.
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
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.
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.
It’s a bummer that Google sold it’s registry to
GoDaddySquarespace.EDIT: seems like I remember it incorrectly
They sold it to Squarespace.
But that is where I get all the news I need.
