Posted on 08/22/2023 7:42:20 AM PDT by Brookhaven
IBM said Tuesday it’s selling its weather unit, including The Weather Channel, Weather.com, Weather Underground and Storm Radar.
IBM will sell the assets to Francisco Partners, a tech-focused private equity firm, for an undisclosed sum. The deal also includes the weather unit’s forecasting science and tech platform, as well as enterprise data services for the broadcast, media, aviation and ad tech industries. Francisco Partners plans to pivot part of the weather business to be more consumer-facing, adding new tools for users related to health and well-being, per the announcement.
As part of the deal, IBM will retain access to the company’s weather data, which it uses to power some of the artificial intelligence models it sells to enterprise clients. That system, which is also trained on NASA’s satellite data, is geared towards parsing ESG data and climate analysis such as natural disaster monitoring.
IBM paid $2 billion for the company in 2016 and has reportedly been exploring a sale since at least April, as it seeks to streamline its business. The company said its weather unit serves an average of 415 million people monthly, and reports in April estimated the coming deal to be valued at more than $1 billion.
The sale aligns with IBM’s strategy shift, as the company narrows its focus to key drivers such as software, cloud services and AI.
One of those bets is Watsonx, the enterprise AI development tool IBM announced in May that’s slated to debut in the third quarter. The company’s goal is to take the lead in user-friendly AI development for businesses, in part because of the massive demand for, and shortage of, human talent in the AI field. The platform includes a feature for AI-generated code, an AI governance toolkit, and a library of thousands of large-scale AI models, trained on language, geospatial data, IT events and The Weather Company’s weather data, which IBM will continue to use.
My experience at the time says to me that Microsoft succeeded in two areas with MS-DOS and Windows where IBM failed with OS2.
Those two areas were marketing - Microsoft was a jaugernaught, where IBm remained staid, and engagement with and open to developrers outside of Microsoft, where IBM was an unfriendly heavy hand. I think OS2 was a technologically superior caddilac (a blind friend who was very tech savy once explained to me, from his perspective, the superiority of OS2, which gave him abilities neither MS-DOS or Windows was deliveruing) trying to keep everything caddilac while MS-DOS and Windows were Fords that developers rushed to improve and add to. I think IBM did that because at the first wave of the PC world IBM did not internally have faith in it, even as they tried to respond to it.
https://www.nas.nasa.gov/SC10/PDF/Datasheets/Maxwell_ESG_demo.pdf
ESG== Earth System Grid (in this case)
“Were you around in 1980 when IBM had 80% or more of the worldwide computing market and were getting sued by the DOJ for anti-trust violations ??:”
Yes I was. I transitioned my company’s computer systems from mainframes to mid-range and mini-computers, to networked database client server operations, over twenty years.
Yes, IBM is not the company they used to be.
But here is another chart that explains how all that is regardless of a good stock value, which is what boards of directors are supposed to be focused on - the fiduciary responsibility to stock holders.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/IBM/ibm/stock-price-history
Reward the guilty, punish the innocent.
Thank you.
In the 1980s/90s I had a friend whose brother worked for IBM. He told me that IBM viewed its core business as building and servicing mainframes; it considered home PCs as a small niche market. After all, how many ordinary consumers would even want a computer?
Was buying the weather channel fulfilling its fiduciary responsibility instead of investing in something in the computer industry, like the one ex-IBMer who posted in this thread their CEO was selling off parts of the company and pocketing millions only to see go to things like buying the weather channel, basically they bear no resemblance to their former self
I took a look at Accuweather and I don’t see the graphical output that Weather Underground has that I like. Personal preference.
To highlight your comment, I worked for IBM and tried to deposit my check at my bank. The teller did not know who “International Business Machines” (name on the check) was and did not want to deposit it until a manager stepped in.
Been awhile since I’ve done it but I’ve traveled using government per diem and government hotel rates. I don’t recall ever being able to stay any place remotely like those. I worked for a contractor at the time.
Who is going to push the climate change BS after this sale?
WU does not do as good a job on pinpoint local weather. I’ve tried it several times and always had to go elsewhere for something.
estimated the coming deal to be valued at more than $1 billion.
Ouch.
After spot-checking the WU data I downloaded it and compared temperature highs and lows and how they related to the precipitation rating (rain amount, or cloudy, or sunny). It was from that I realized that decentralized solar would work amazingly well in my area. For whatever reason, whenever it's really hot in the summer or really cold in the winter ("really cold" to us Alabamians LOL), it's almost always also sunny. Thus, on the days I'd need a lot of extra power to keep my house cool or keep my house warm, on those days I'd have a lot of free power anyway from the sun. (Not 100% of the time, but about 90% of the time.)
I'll say that the data worked in predicting the throughput. Now that I've had solar for 2 years and upgraded it a year ago, in the past 12 months it's produced 82% of all the power I need in my all-electric house, including charging the EV for about 23K miles per year (of the 26K miles we drove it the first year, about 3K of those miles were charged away from home).
The WU data helped me tweak the first version of my system 2 years ago to know how much solar panel throughput and battery storage and inverter capacity I needed to take advantage of the economies of scale without going too far and running into the law of diminishing returns. That gave me the 58.5% throughput I was expecting (anticipating 50% to 60%) with a payoff date of 12 years (assuming only a reasonable 3% inflation rate of energy costs I'm avoiding). That was before getting an EV. After having solar for a year (and great data from my inverter export recording in 5-minute candles) and since it was time to replace my wife's ICE crossover, I bought an EV crossover and added onto the solar components to achieve the plus 80% throughput and the system costs and EV costs still pay for themselves in a decade (9 years from now).
So do I. One thing I wish they would change though, is to make the ten-day forecast chart the same on mobile as it appears on desktop. I emailed them about this a couple years ago but it didn’t do any good.
The desktop chart has all the pertinent info one needs about the weather right there at a glance, and well organized. The mobile version isn’t as complete nor set up as well. I’ve been using it for years and it’s as accurate as any other forecast.
After this sale I hope the new owners don’t destroy the most useful, concise, and nice-looking weather forecast page (their ten-day chart) in the business.
It makes sense to sell something that makes a profit. That is attractive to a buyer. They probably have lots of "assets" that aren't attractive to a buyer.
Turned into the “climate change” channel.
Maybe the new owner can get their forecasts correct better than the 15% now. And, maybe they’ll stick to weather rather than everything being climate change.
Don't count on it.
Agree completely. The phone app is not nearly as "usable".
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