After the Red Hat mess I see many people saying IBM destroys everything they touch, but I can’t think of many examples of it. Can you tell me what else IBM has destroyed after acquiring it, or something good that they themselves developed and then ruined it with stupid corporate choices?

  • Curious Canid
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    671 year ago

    IBM bought the Weather Underground. It had a set of developer APIs that allowed small-scale apps to make use of their data. As soon as IBM bought them the APIs were changed and replaced with a set priced to be affordable only to other mega-corporations.

    It killed a tiny little free app I had built around it. The real irony is that I took a deep breath, looked around, and adapted the app to use the Dark Skies API instead. A few years later Apple bought Dark Skies and killed off its API too. {heavy sigh}

      • Curious Canid
        link
        181 year ago

        I had heard of that, but was just too discouraged to try it at the time. Now that I’ve had some time to recover I should give it a look. Adapting my code to use it doesn’t look like it would take much effort.

        Thanks!

    • @Ejh3k
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      51 year ago

      There has been a distinct difference with weather underground since IBM bought it. Mostly in the app performance, but for my money there is no better weather app in terms of accuracy and forecast.

      My job relies on the weather and I have converted many people over the years.

    • Vortieum
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      fedilink
      31 year ago

      Something about that story sounds awfully familiar…

      • Curious Canid
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        11 year ago

        I’ve talked about it over in that other place. :-)

        Nice to see you here!