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.
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.
The Weather Channel tv channel isn’t owned by IBM and isn’t part of this deal
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/
Too late, it’s been shit for years now.
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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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Weather that is a good decision or not remains to be seen
Please don’t make Weather Underground shitty. It’s the only weather website that gives accurate information around here.
Hate to tell you this, but it’s been shitty since the NEXRAD feeds broke and they never bothered to fix ‘em.
Maybe for you, but all the other weather websites I’ve tried are wrong. Even DarkSky was wrong half the time. It said sunny skies when we were in the middle of a blizzard once. I don’t know, maybe there’s something weird about where I am.
I had a similar experience with Dark Sky, but Weather Underground was always great. The weird part of it is that I’m near Chicago, where the NWS office got trashed for their awful handling of the forecast and response to the storms that led to the Plainfield F5 in 1990 - bad radar was often cited as a reason for that response, so NEXRAD especially has been key to NWS’s improvement here.
It’s www.weather.gov/lot for me now.
Oh wow, weather.gov looks really nice these days. It used to be bare bones. I may use it from now on, thanks!
Edit: The only thing I don’t like is I can’t see where it has the current heat index.
Not sure if this is the case for other regions, but it’s right here for me:
Yeah, not there for me. Still worth using overall though.
If only their UI wasn’t so trash I’d only ever use weather.gov
Yeah it’s pretty bare-bones. Pretty much the only site I am aware of that still uses image maps. The other one I like is the College of DuPage Meteorology site, though that gets even more archaic in some places: https://weather.cod.edu/
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…
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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.
I think it’s fair to look at IBM with a more cynical eye. Historically it’s been “acquire, way you’ll make no changes, wait a bit, make changes that piss off 80% of your customer base.” Somewhere in there is a “reduce customer service effectiveness” step that is distinct from “make changes.”
After that it’s either “sell it off to the highest bidder” or “keep at it because who else are the customers gonna use?”
It’s a bummer that Google sold it’s registry to
GoDaddySquarespace.EDIT: seems like I remember it incorrectly
They sold it to Squarespace.
Today I learned that IBM is still a major thing
