“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.
They lost a billion dollars, the proof is self evident, they got rid of the asset because it was losing money, a billion dollars wasted on something that wasn’t a core business
This reminds me of when the skinny company with a funny name -- Google -- bought the very early days internet search engine Deja News in 2000.
What they really wanted was Deja.com's vast usenet usergroup archive.
For the young, Usenet was the original BBS format from the modem days of "dialing into" the internet before the World Wide Web became mature. The Usenet was similar in concept to Free Republic in that all of the major news stories of the day were uploaded to the Usenet for discussion and research purpose.
In hindsight, acquiring the Usenet archive is how Google began building their index technology for their search engines, and look at where they are today.
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.
-PJ