IBM Buys More Clouds

So as I’m browsing the internet this lovely weekend I stumbled upon a headline that stood out to me. “IBM buying The Weather Company is literally a joke on Twitter” is that particular headline from fortune.com. This has two very interesting parts about it: 1. IBM bought the Weather Company. And more importantly 2: Twitter is making jokes about it. I love twitter jokes! Let’s give it a read and maybe look for some more information about it.

Apparently the jokes stem from the fact that IBM has been doing a lot of work with the cloud and cloud computing. So when people heard that IBM bought the digital assets of The Weather Company they, naturally, thought that someone made a mistake at a board meeting.

One twitter user, @Cryo, says “

IBM Board meetings notes:

"We should buy the Cloud"

"What?"

"You know, the Cloud"

"Why?"

"We want to be the biggest"

*buys weather channel*”

This is great! Hilarious stuff we got here! They just want to make sure they are on top of the cloud computing game. This is the obvious joke that comes to basically everyone’s mind when they hear this news. But what does it actually mean for IBM and the Weather Company? And what does it mean for the average people that use the Weather Company’s service to prepare their outfit for the day?

            With a bit more research I found more articles trying to explain the actual details of the purchase. According to HuffPost Tech, IBM will be able to give the same services that the Weather Company gave; only they will be more precise. IBM will be able to use their Watson supercomputer to pull tons and tons of information together and create a very precise weather report. But where does it get this information? According to IBM, “The company’s sophisticated models analyze data from three billion weather forecast reference points, more than 40 million smartphones and 50,000 airplane flights per day, allowing it to offer a broad range of data-driven products and services to more than 5000 clients in the media, aviation, energy, insurance and government industries.” So essentially they will get data from a very wide variety of different locations and then give it back to its user base.

            IBM plans on sharing this information about weather with normal users like me and you, but also more industry based users such as insurance companies and airlines. This means that an insurance company might be able to alert its customers to potentially harmful weather. Airlines will know more accurately when plane may be able to take off and land. I assume that these are not the only things that these types of companies can do with this information considering that weather affects so many things in the world.

            In a way this deal affects all of us in a huge way, but at the same time, it doesn’t. We will still live the same day to day lives whether we choose to look up the weather before we get dressed or not. But the way we interact with companies may change. They may use this more precise information to screw us over. Take an insurance company as an example from above. They can warn us about potentially threatening weather scenarios; and then proceed to not cover damages if we chose not follow their suggestions about what to do. This is only one circumstance that I can think of. I’m sure there are tons more situations that I am overlooking, but regardless this buyout will probably affect the average person a lot more than we think.