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.
This article is wrong about IBM having owned the cable channel.
When IBM purchased the Weather Company back in 2016, I looked into it and determined that they did NOT purchase the cable channel.
The Wikipedia article for The Weather Company states:
“The Weather Company was previously owned by a consortium made up of the Blackstone Group, Bain Capital, and NBCUniversal. That consortium sold the Weather Company’s product and technology assets to IBM on January 29, 2016, but retained possession of The Weather Channel cable network until March 2018, when it was sold to Entertainment Studios.[2] “
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Weather_Company
According to the Wikipedia article, which cites a story from 2012 in the New York Times as a source:
“The Weather Company started as the Weather Channel in 1980, and launched two years later. In 2012, the company created a broader holding company and replaced the word “Channel” with “Company” to better reflect their growing lineup of digital products.[3]”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Weather_Company
“The cable TV segment was not acquired by IBM, but will license weather forecast data and analytics from IBM under a long-term contract.”
Wikipedia and CNBC both are notorious In getting things wrong
At least Wikipedia has source citations for most of the stuff it says.
I guess even if those source citations are wrong, my original still stands, IBM owned a business that was completely outside of their core business and have wasted a ton of money on things other than improving what they do best and have been doing for decades.
The list of companies that have gone down this road is long, some realize their mistakes and turn it around, others disappear, especially in the technology sector.
Remember the name Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) they were the going overtake IBM at one time, they are gone.
Remember Sun Microsystems, they don’t exist anymore.
My former company Burroughs doesn’t exist anymore along with Sperry-Univac, they merged when I worked there in the mid-80s to form Unisys, which still exists but bears no resemblance to what they once were.
Apple was nearly gone by hiring a non-IT CEO, brought back Steve Jobs and reinvented themselves and are probably the most valuable company in the world right now.
Hewlett-Packard (HP) is another company moving closer to oblivion that looks nothing like they once were. They hired the horrible Carly Fiorina, I have a friend that started at HP and immediately had a negative 80 hours of PTO, the policy was everyone had to take a mandatory 2-week furlough at the end of the year, if they didn’t have the PTO, they went negative into the next year, this policy did wonders to employee moral.
GE went on a binge and bought among others NBCU and had no business in the entertainment industry, they also started GE Capital both of which in the end cost them a ton of money, they seem to have righted the ship with some sane management.
Boeing turned the company over to bean counters and ended up with planes falling out of the sky.
All these companies have something in common, they all have been lead by people who know nothing about how the business operates, they know numbers which in the end has cost the company in some cases everything.
I used to work for EDS which was bought by HP.
EDS was a good place to work. HP, not so much. I was glad to leave.
HP was stupid with that mandatory furlough, they even required people on contracts to take it, meaning HP doesn’t get paid by the customer for the hours not worked.
I was a contractor to both EDS and HP working on the Bank of America account our group overhauled the entire branch bank network in the country routers, switches, circuits, etc.
We also always had a refresh project at the branches going on
We also did the Foundational Cisco Voice for the branches and enterprise sites and rolled into Merrill-Lynch and Countrywide Mortgage when the bank purchased them, it was a great run until HP lost most of the business under Meg Whitman
What a piece of work she is, and she dares criticize Trump?
“Yes they made money from the sale of the weather channel that’s not the point, IBM is in the technology business the spent on the weather channel could have been spent on their core busines”
Technology was the reason for the weathner channel - mountains of weather data collected and owned by IBM, ported onto the weather channel and sold to others. Getting managing monster amounts of data held for sale IS a technology business - just not “computers” the way the average Joe sees it.
They do make computers, the expensive kind that store and manage mountains of data and applications, like in “cloud services” - one of the best growing “computer technology” business areas.
IBM continues to give a good return to stockholders, whether or not retail consumers see what IBM is doing.
I stand by my point IBM was in a business that had nothing to do with their core business and history shows that usually doesn’t end up well.
I stand by MY point. IBM is a technology company and comuters are only a part of it and have been only a part of it for a long time, and the weather channel was a technology play, which it still is as IBM keeps access to the weather data and will integrate it into IBM’s A.I. strategies. If you want a PC with an IBM heritage you can buy a Lenovo.
You know how it is a bad idea to invest in businesses that are not part of your core business, is the fact that IBM is selling it at a loss of 1 billion.
That’s one billion down the drain that could have been spent on improving their current business and not some business they knew nothing about. If the weather business was profitable, they would not have sold it at a loss.
When you have management who doesn’t understand the business, they invest in losing propositions.
You pretend to know IBM’s “core” business better than IBm does.
IBM continues in the vein and style it began - serving the business needs of businesses, not so much consumers, and bigger businesses more than small ones. IBM hardware continues to evolve and continues to serve businesses in the main way IBM has always done - storage of data and applications and delivery of applications to the office user. The old IBM green screen terminals were no more at the heart of that than the PC is today, so the PC was not at the heart of evolving the IBM “core” business. But data more than ever has become “core” to IBM and that data, whether “weather” or zillions of other stuff is a value to how IBM is evolving its core business.
What does weather have to do with the Computer Industry? Nothing, considering IBM lost a billion dollars and finally wised up and sold the money loser.
It’s equivalent to GE investing in TV networks or a finance company, both cost them dearly.
It’s like Apple bringing in an executive that sold Pepsi before taking over a technology company. To their credit they corrected the situation by bringing back Steve Jobs.
It’s like Boeing bringing in accountants to replace engineers and planes start falling out of the sky.
It’s like HP bringing in an Ebay Executive that sold off a major portion of the company and lost a ONE BILLION dollar per year account.
Microsoft to the credit fixed their mistake and got rid of Steve Balmer who didn’t know anything about technology and replaced him with someone who understood the company and turned it around before they went into oblivion.
The Technology is full of examples of colossal failures by management that cost companies their livelihood.
I’ve watched to many grown men grown men crying like babies after getting kicked out after 30 plus years of loyal employment due to gross mismanagement by executives who could not sell anything.
“What does weather have to do with the Computer Industry?”
It was never about “the weather”, and always about the data. You are looking at the hole not the donut. Data and A.I. use of data has been a growing and evolving part of IBM’s “core” business of serving business customers. They will never make a PC for you and they don’t care if that bugs you.
Again, they sold it for a one-billion-dollar loss, it was and still is a terrible idea and got IBM into an area where they had no idea how to make it work.
Go back in history, it’s full of companies doing the same thing, Eastman-Kodak is gone regardless of all the patents they owned, Sear is basically gone, even though they were the Walmart of the yesteryear, the list is endless of companies that lost track of what they did and hired managers who knew even less and it cost them and millions of employees dearly.
You haven’t lived until you’ve watches 30-40 people crowd around a fax machine on a Friday afternoon, sweating because they knew layoffs were getting announced via fax, two faxes came in, one for those who could come back on Monday and those who were done, many of them 30-year loyal employees and watch them leaving the office crying like babies.
You haven’t lived until a good friend of yours’s calls you on Sunday night so nervous he was stone cold drunk from fear of losing his job all due to the incompetence of management who all walked away with bonuses.
You haven’t lived until you’ve been called by the Government asking about layoffs or called by attorney’s asking you testify against the company you are working for about firing older employees in favor of younger employees.
You haven’t lived until you’ve been called by your direct manager asking you to talk to your friend about retiring because he’s told old and costing the company too much money.
“IBM into an area where they had no idea how to make it work.”
That is your interpretation. For them it was always about the data, not about becoming a major web presence.
They were not trying to repeat the Microsoft error of trying to be a major web presence (MSNBC - a total disaster for Microsoft). That was never how IBM saw the weather channel tie in.
“Europe is killing itself primarily with their insane “climate” policies and EU morons. Just like the US.”
I think that Europe is failing because faster than here in the U.S. laws, policies and attitudes are killing free speech. Killing free speech means issues enter a state of stasis, not a dynamic state, so cultural orthodxy takes over and chane becomes harder and harder to get out of it, with different view always killed in one way or anoter.
Example - a man, a minister, in the U.K., was arrested for preaching against abortion in public, in a public space and the charge was a “hate crime”.
To me free speech is core to western civilization and when it dies (when it is killed) western civilization will be commiting suicide.
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