"IBM purchased the Weather Co. in 2016 and sells weather data to, among others, Apple, for its weather app. The purchase could signal that Apple will develop its own weather model rather than continue to use IBM-derived data, or it may indicate that Apple, too, liked the design of the app." https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/03/31/apple-buys...
It's turtles all the way down[1]. The Weather Company also leverages NOAA data and is listed as such as a weather service provider on NOAA's site[2]. Although they ostensibly augment it with other sources and apply their own forecasting models to the data, they're still basically repackaging NOAA data in one form or another.
[1] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down
[2] https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/success/weather-service-providers
... in the USA. But one of its great advantages is the data it receives from tens of thousands of amateur weather reporting stations globally. The Wunderground forecast for our locality is hyper-localised and very accurate for that reason, particularly compared to the national Met Office forecast which applies to an airport 35 miles away, beside a lake and on the other side of mountains.
I remember fondly using their Wunder Radio app in the early iPhone years.
[1] https://hjelp.yr.no/hc/en-us/categories/200450271-About-Yr-t...
Buy things and make them exclusive just so no one else can have them.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extingu...
That is in the case of Epic not the OP.
This is just nonsense.
Every acquisition they've ever done can directly be seen in future projects:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
The products you don't see give a hint into their roadmap.
It's going to be the same people, working on the same product, but now, it's going to unavailable via their cheif competitor. Tell me how on earth you can consider that not killing competition.
That said, I don't believe that to be the issue either. Death by a thousand cuts, maybe, but I seriously doubt closing off one app from the Android ecosystem is going to do any damage whatsoever. I think this is more about the acquisition of talent and nothing more.
But now it won't have to pay for API access anymore, since they'll own the whole backend.
Perhaps more. It’s a matter of comparing all users of Dark Sky, including via the API and on Android, against the user base of iOS.
And perhaps they’ll be able to use the technology in other countries, bringing in more users than Dark Sky ever could.
>And perhaps they’ll be able to use the technology in other countries, bringing in more users than Dark Sky ever could.
45% of ios users are well off Americans. Outside of the US 90% of phones are Android who won't be able to use it anymore.
Not disagreeing with the following paragraph, but GP specifically asked about "access", and all of these iOS users already had access to Dark Sky; this strictly decreases access, even if more people end up using it.
This suggests that Apple may only buy to augment their product line; whilst still making the core experience worse for everyone overall.
I’ll admit I’ve not done a proper study of post-acquisition Shazam. I’m going on casual observation here.
It's a terrible story and he was treated badly, but you're making it more dramatic than it was.
as an aside, my first thought at this phrase was that "he died by removing all the windows?" it took a second to process that properly.
but to the point, that's the kind of anti-competition we need to root out quickly. compete on merits, not on demerits.
i'm sad about the embark app, but i'm hoping that the dark sky integration means no more sending data (however "anonymized") to the shady data broker that is the weather channel.
The Defenestrations of Prague (Czech: Pražská defenestrace, German: Prager Fenstersturz, Latin: Defenestratio Pragensis) were three incidents in the history of Bohemia in which multiple people were defenestrated (thrown out of a window). The origin of the word "defenestrate" ("out of the window") is believed to come from the episodes in Prague in 1618 when the disgruntled Protestant estates threw two royal governors out of the castle window and wrote an extensive Apologia to this act.
For those who are extra slow like me: he killed himself by jumping out of a window.
Is the value of the weather channel that investors expect the national weather service to be abolished?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/11/25/weather-i...
"In 2017, Trump nominated Barry Myers, the former CEO of AccuWeather, a company that has advocated for the privatization of large parts of the National Weather Service, to lead NOAA. However, his nomination stalled, in part because of conflict-of-interest concerns since his family still owns the private forecasting company."
It certainly wouldn’t be profitable for Accuweather to have to do things like gather weather data and have supercomputers to analyze.
i'd be super happy if they switched to the national weather service, but absent that, dark sky is more privacy preserving than the weather channel (who reportedly sell location data, for example).
I for one am super happy that people with this attitude have been totally unable to penetrate the medical devices field!
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/29/business/coronavirus-us-v...
TLDR: A $3000 ventilator was “on schedule to file for market approval in September 2013” and then Covidien bought out the competition to prevent it coming to fruition.
Apple believes it should make/provide the whole “widget”. If they think every phone should ship with a really good weather app, they’ll do one. If one comes on the market that they think is better, they’ll buy it and make it the new default.
I mean they’re not in the weather app business. They aren’t competing against Dark Sky. What they’re competing against is Android, and if their phone comes with a stellar weather app out of the box, that is good for Apple. Others can continue to make weather apps.
iOS comes with a calculator. People still buy PC Calc and Calcbot despite the built-in being pretty useful.
I heard it was because Apple’s C-levels weren’t happy with any of the concepts for a calculator UX that fills the screen of an iPad - and they’re right, even the best iPad calculator there is (PCalc) feels weird to use just to do some quick sums because it fills up my 13-inch iPad Pro’s screen.
I remember some early fan-made concepts for the iPad had it running iPhone apps in floating windows - I think if Apple baked that functionality into the iPad OS from the beginning it would have meant a whole slew of small utility apps like the calculator, clocks and alarms, compass, etc wouldn’t need to be remade - but I’m sure they killed that idea because it wouldn’t motivate developers into making first-class iPad apps - and by “punishing” users with the terrible full-screen iPhone app mode it incentivises developers to put effort into making good native iPad apps - while at the same time making small utility apps an impossibility for iPad OS (though this doesn’t seem to have convinced Instagram...)
To be fair, they could exist now as a Today Screen widget, but then you can’t use it while you have another app open. It’s only with iOS 12+ multitasking support for slide-over and side-bar apps that a calculator app could now work - but it would still need to support full-screen mode - but we’re so close now! And given that, I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple did allow iPad apps to run only in sidebar or floating mode - but only if an app really won’t work as a full-screen app - and when/if they do, they’ll definitely launch their own calculator app.
Y’know the Apple Watch didn’t get a first-party calculator until 2019?
> For companies like Apple, these acquisitions are more about killing competition than they are about improving their own services or user interfaces
You definitely see this with not just Apple but any big tech company. Either they acquire a company for their tech, for their people who work there (talent), for their data or finally, just to be able to kill their company/product.
To make the list more complete I've seen large tech companies acquire another tech company for their users and/or their brand. Think about Microsoft buying Github or Skype.
Skype was almost certainly some sort of scheme to kill Skype and bring lawful intercept to the platform. Skype at one point owned consumer voip globally.
When Edwin Howard Armstrong invented FM radio, he was working for RCA, which had everything invested in AM radio, an incompatible technology. RCA chose not to invest, and used their political clout to lobby the FCC to cripple FM radio, and their lawyers to drive Armstrong into debt in a protracted legal battle. This drove Armstrong to suicide by defenestration. For companies like Apple, these acquisitions are more about killing competition than they are about improving their own services or user interfaces.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Howard_Armstrong http://www.free-culture.cc/