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.
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.
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?”
I hear this a lot, but every company I’ve been a part of that did it seemed to be a bad idea. If a division makes money, the only reason to sell is because you believe the investment in that division can be used to make more money (for less). Getting rid of a profitable entity is usually greed based.
It’s corporate-speak that means nothing. The same company “focused on it’s core business” today will buy something unrelated sometime later and say it’s “poised for growth in a growing market”.
It’s a bummer that Google sold it’s registry to GoDaddy.