“I’m not sure what Microsoft hoped to accomplish by buying up the weather data technology — maybe we’ll find out in another 10 years, but I doubt it. They may have tried to recreate the Google experience, and failed.”
It was IBM not Microsoft that bought the weather channel. What they got and what they wanted was the whole data collection process for the weather data - world wide and vast, and the data. The sale still gives them access to all that. Vast data collection, managing, and analyzing it are all part of A.I. and A.I. was always IBMS’s target internally for that data - and now part of what IBM thinks it is and will do with A.I. And A.I., internally, is a growing part of what IBM considers a core element of its future plans. That they bought the Weather Channel for $1 billion and now have sold it for $2billion seems, internally, to IBM as less of a loss than the numbers on paper.
Still, you know the saying... "Everybody complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it."
I suppose they can use AI for better weather prediction, but how will they monetize it with so much publicly available information?
-PJ