This sounds odd, but I thought of beautiful sunsets when I heard that IBM plans to buy the fast growing parts of The Weather Channel’s parent, which is to say essentially everything but the TV part.
The deal includes weather.com and the weather apps, as well as stuff most consumers are happily unaware of: a unit that supplies weather forecasts to businesses.
You might think this swap of corporate parents will be invisible, even if you're among the two-thirds of American adults who regularly check in with the company to see what weather is ahead.
But that might miss a fundamental shift taking place in corporate priorities.
Consumers like you and I are not IBM’s bread and butter priority. IBM is fundamentally a tech and consulting company that does business with other businesses. It’s a worthy and profitable endeavor. But directly pleasing personal consumers is no longer in the DNA of the former personal computer maker.
That’s what got me thinking about beautiful sunsets.
The Weather Company has lots of digital experts assigned to make sure consumers get a cool, smooth experience online with lots of extra features. And for the last few years, the company has held an in-house competition to brainstorm digital products that would wow consumers.
I witnessed last year's nearly week-long competition near the company HQ in metro Atlanta's Cobb County. Two meteorologists, a tech guy and a product leader designed the winning proposal: an app that predicts conditions for spectacular sunsets and alerts people when to take great photos.
It’s a nice extra to delight some consumers.
Which has me wondering: Is that the kind of thing IBM would bother to spend time on? In fact, will IBM bother to push much to continue boosting consumer experiences on weather.com or the weather app?
Business focus
The company has a global portfolio and 400,000 employees. It works with most of the world’s biggest banks, retailers, oil and gas companies and health care businesses. But even IBM, with all its resources, can’t do everything.
IBM bought the weather properties mostly for their data and forecasting power to help businesses handle one of their biggest variables: weather. Home builders worry about rain. Insurance companies fret about hail and want to text policyholders to get vehicles under cover. Retailers can see boom or bust depending on what the weather is doing, and, if they knew what to expect, they could schedule more or fewer workers or change what their advertising.
Yeah, I know: weather forecasting doesn’t have a perfect batting average. But with millions or hundreds of millions of dollars on the line, businesses may pay more for even modest improvements in the accuracy and localization of weather predictions.
IBM and Weather Company executives have pretty cool ideas in mind. If self-driving cars become more of a thing, can weather predictions be plugged into the vehicle to prepare for what’s ahead? Can companies come up with ways to reset our alarms clocks so they buzz 10 minutes early if rain is likely to make our morning commute even longer?
The Weather Company, which is mostly owned by investment firms Blackstone Group and Bain Capital, uses a sort of Brunswick stew of ways to figure out what weather is coming. It taps into government and corporate monitoring stations, flying airplanes and a bevy of volunteer weather enthusiasts that feed into its Weather Underground unit.
But I hadn’t realized something else it taps into to figure out weather conditions: Our smartphones. About 40 million mobile devices outfitted with its weather app can transmit barometric pressure readings. (So, thank you, fellow smartphoners, for giving me a heads up about whether I’ll have a soggy weekend.)
Us little folks
That’s one reason why IBM may want to hold on to us little folks.
Another is that it could use weather.com and the weather apps to test advertising and marketing uses for business clients.
In fact, Pat Toole, IBM’s general manager of the Internet of Things, told me the company will increase the amount spent on the web site and apps in order to expand them faster globally.
“It’s really strategic to us,” Toole said. (And, he said, he’d personally like to get the sunset photo app, which is set to come out in early 2016.)
Cameron Clayton, the Weather Company’s president of product and technology, assured me that people in his operation “could not be more excited” about IBM’s purchase.
Weather Company employees have already been through lots of change. (They are in the media industry, after all.) Of 1,400 employees, 950 are in the parts shifting over to IBM. Those at the TV network won't be making the jump, but it's likely their part of the business is still up for sale.
In recent years, I’ve heard that some TV people at the Weather Channel had been getting a little antsy – perhaps even envious — about all the money and resources flowing to the projects of their colleagues on the digital side. Now, I wonder whether those digital developers and others will see themselves lose attention as IBM focuses on data crunchers.
That is, after all, the way of the business world and life in general: Almost nobody stays the cool kid forever.
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