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Warren Buffett sells his Oracle shares, retains $44B investment in Apple

325 points by MilnerRoute 8y ago

HillaryBriss 8y ago
i don't get this. their machines are too costly. the old insane greatness has become watered down with a focus on global logistics. and what about the supply chain issues with China? what does Apple have on the horizon -- data services? an emphasis on the privacy protecting ecosystem? where is the new vision?
- username223 8y ago
  I don't see Apple achieving hyper-growth and becoming a $10 trillion company, but they have a solid business selling high-end hardware to people willing to pay for it with money instead of data. What does Oracle have on the horizon? Legacy enterprise support and lawsuits about Java?
  - mandeepj 8y ago
    > What does Oracle have on the horizon? They could become a good force in the cloud after netsuite purchase. https://cloud.oracle.com/home https://cloud.oracle.com/home
    - ddebernardy 8y ago
      They could keep trying, I suppose. FWIW they've been in the cloud business since the 2000s. They and IBM were some of the few who were in that business early, and even then their respective reputations preceded them. (This was before XEN, widespread adoption of virtualization, and a slew of other DC techs that democratized using the cloud.) I would imagine they both got enough fortune-whatever companies onboard to earn good money, but neither are market leaders today. Just spitballing, but I'd assume their cloud customers are all companies who buy other stuff from them.
      - amacbride 8y ago
        Exactly. With the hostile takeover of PeopleSoft, Oracle bought themselves a number of huge customers who are disinclined to change ERP systems on anything other than decade-long timelines. It has evolved and is now cloud...ish, so they can certainly talk themselves into being perceived as a “leader.” (Even though they’re not really cloud-native in the way that Workday, Salesforce, or others are.)
  - askafriend 8y ago
    If Apple strengthens their foothold in Health and Health related services/integrations, their marketcap will multiply from where it is now.
    - TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
      I honestly can't see Apple making this work. Health is a diverse, messy, market. Apple's schtick has always been making devices that make computing magical, and health would be a huge shift away from that. IMO the market is really looking for a a powerful all-in-one diagnostic health appliance - something like the analyser Theranos was pitching for, but which actually works, and is more comprehensive. De-industrialising health and making the personal equivalent of a diagnostic lab that could keep track of key markers, watch nutrition, exercise, and supplements, and transfer information to doctors - AI or human - would be a major breakthrough. But the technology for that doesn't exist yet. And even it becomes available it may not be affordable or portable. And because bodily fluids are involved it conflicts with the Apple image of clean minimalism. That leaves health as set of tentative fragmented tools and services which provide reassurance here and there - like the fall notification in Watch - but are a long way short of a comprehensive service. The fitness market is a more obvious choice. But if you look at Apple's record, it's not inspiring. Fitbit is a strong competitor, because Watch hasn't lived up to its potential - possibly because Apple can't decide if Watch should be a fashion statement or a personal fitness device. It doesn't really make sense to consumers to try to sell it as both. Behind all of that, I just can't see the current management team having the skill or imagination to make it happen. I think health is going to remain a side interest - a nice add-on, but not a huge new core market that Apple can expand into.
- JaleDarvis 8y ago
  Healthcare services using the watch. I was a doubter but the fitness rings schtick combined with a weight lifting app has me sold on it. Streaming content? The consolidated news app is interesting as well, but probably not a huge revenue stream.
  - macintux 8y ago
    It will be interesting to see more and more insurance companies offering discounted/free Apple Watches. Fitness + accurate monitoring of heart activity + whatever's coming next makes for a powerful combination.
    - dogma1138 8y ago
      It’s pretty common in the U.K. where health insurance packages offer Apple Watch / Fitness trackers and gym memberships for them it’s a no brainer if even 1 out of 50 insurers would alter their lifestyle it would more than pay for itself.
- johnwheeler 8y ago
  Well, they make machines that are very costly and they focus on global logistics. They've also got a huge supply chain in China. You don't need a 'new vision' to make bucketloads of cash for your investors.
  - hermitdev 8y ago
    Apple doesnt make phones or computers that are much more costly (from a hardware perspective) than any other brand. What they have is higher margins per unit due to branding and brand loyalty.
    - valuearb 8y ago
      No they have higher margins due to custom hardware and software added value.
- bradleyjg 8y ago
  At their PE ratio they don't need to have a bright shiny future of limitless growth. They just need to not be Nokia. AMZN on the other hand ...
- B1FF_PSUVM 8y ago
  Perhaps the same can be said about Louis Vuitton handbags, and does not stop MHLV, or whatstheirletters, from making money hand over fist.
- MrScruff 8y ago
  When you say the machines are too costly, who are you implying that's bad for? Presumably not investors?
  - HillaryBriss 8y ago
    it's bad if a company wants to expand its customer base while potential new customers are instead buying cheaper products from competitors
    - MrScruff 8y ago
      It's also bad if you drop your ASP to the point it hits profits though.
- semi-extrinsic 8y ago
  At this point it's not crazy to think of people holding AAPL equally for the dividend as for expected future share price growth. It paid out dividend at 1.67% of the share price last year. That's $700+ million in dividend for Mr. Buffett, not too shabby.
- thesausageking 8y ago
  Apple has a lot of potential to expand into health care tech and digital therapeutics, which is a huge, growing market. They have a great brand, expertise in making consumer hardware and software, and they're one of the few large tech companies that's able to take privacy seriously.
  - atomical 8y ago
    You mean consumer health care tech? From what I can see that is all about marketing and has very little to do with science. I see it more as a fad.
    - solarkraft 8y ago
      Don't they still have a bunch of unused potential in activity tracking?
    - Spooky23 8y ago
      No way. There’s a huge market for medical monitoring that is dominated by big dumb players. Your insurance pays like $3k to wear a heart monitor for a day or two.
      - adrianN 8y ago
        The problem with that huge market is not that it's somehow hard to make monitoring devices, but it's hard to get them through the bureaucratic process of being legal to use for medical purposes. Doing that is quite an orthogonal skillset to engineering.
        Spooky23 8y ago
        A company with billions in cash can learn quickly.
    - intopieces 8y ago
      Americans are getting older. Apple released a new Apple Watch with fall detection and it was 100% of the reason 3 of my coworkers purchased one for aging parents. Health is a privacy sensitive industry and Apple is the only company that has been selling privacy as a core feature. This is squarely within Apple’s target and they will bet big on it.
- Spooky23 8y ago
  They print money and own many segments of smartphone that really matter. They can cruise for a decade doing nothing.
  - fauigerzigerk 8y ago
    I don't think you can ever say that about any consumer electronics company. All of them are always one replacement cycle away from potential disaster. Apple has enormous margins to defend. If they cruise for a decade their margins will approach the average margins of the industry because people will no longer pay extra for the brand.
    - ck425 8y ago
      Outside of China they're not paying for the brand. They're paying for the iOS eco system and that's still a valuable moat. It remains to be seen if a super app such as WeChat will emerge in other markets but until/unless it does Apple have a pretty strong moat.
      - fauigerzigerk 8y ago
        I don't believe that this huge difference in margins is purely down to pragmatic considerations anywhere in the world.
- ksec 8y ago
  TL;DR - Apple is extremely healthy, with many rooms for growth or sustain its current profits / revenue. 1. Still Growing number of iPhone users, 900M as of the end of 2018. I made a prediction in 2015 / 2016 that Apple could reach the unthinkable ( At the time ) 1B iPhone user by 2020, looks like they are well on course to do that. There will be roughly ~3.5B Smartphone users world wide in 2020. Even if Apple does't grow its user base anymore. Selling to its 1B Customer, which are also the higher spending group, would still be a lucrative business that not many other company could match. 2. Health - When it comes to Health, people don't want to spend money on a brand that that cant trust. So even if company X has an exact replica of Apple Watch with exact software and function, people would still trust Apple and spend 50% or more on it. Also worth mentioning the group of people who cares about health are also likely the one who are passed mid life and has higher deposable income. And health insurance company loves these Data. I am actually surprised at how affordable Apple priced the Apple Watch S4, they could have jack up the price in US purely on the ECG function. ( I have heard many stories about parents want to buy the Apple Watch *immediately8 after reading or watching the Apple Keynote, I am also surpassed how many non-tech people actually do watch the keynote live ) 3. Services - It is a growing segment but honestly, even if Apple Attract 100M Apple Music + Apple TV Subs at $20 combined, that is only $6B per quarter, roughly 10 - 15% increase of their current revenue. It is not a huge percentage, but it is hard for Apple to grow when it is so big. I think the future is Apple offering 24+ Months of Financing ( leaving the 24 months for Carrier ) , like 36 / 48 months for iPhone, charged to their Apple Credit Card, Operated and Backed by Goldman Sachs. Bundles along with other high margin product like AppleCare+. This could potentially be the next revenue and profits growth. 4. The Mac and iPad still have yet to show their full potential. There is no reason why Apple could not gain a 200M+ Mac User base. And iPad / iPad Pro still needs to battle out the Education and Pro Segment.
nezzor 8y ago
I thought he didn’t invest in tech because it was outside his “circle of competence”?
- appsonify 8y ago
  2015 called
- ddebernardy 8y ago
  If memory serves me well, in one of the letters he sent a number of years back (10-ish?), he mentioned that they had someone in their staff managing a portfolio of stock picks and doing a great job at it, and gave a heads up to readers that they might find tech stocks come in and out of their portfolio every so often as a result. Presumably he liked the returns he was seeing and jumped in too. Also, Apple displays a number of characteristics that he reportedly likes to invest in: the business that Apple is in is straightforward to understand, the market is big and they've a strong or growing market position, they're profitable and have a big cash position, they've a strong brand and difficult to reproduce expertise (i.e. a moat).
- altairiumblue 8y ago
  Yes, this always struck me as strange and at the time my naive thought was that Apple was overvalued. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTd7Iax-I60 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTd7Iax-I60 What he says around 00:27 about Snickers applies very much to Apple as a brand. This is the only Buffet-ish explanation of why Berkshire would invest in Apple that I could think of. And apart from this, the decision to buy a lot of Apple stock a while back was made by other asset managers, not Warren himself, and I'm sure was the result of thorough analysis, not based on some offhand comment in an interview.
- tim333 8y ago
  A couple of possible points on that. Buffett is always learning and maybe he feel's he understands Apple enough now. Also to quote Buffett "If you look at Apple, I think it earns almost twice as much as the second most profitable company in the United States". Which I guess attracts him - he's always been into consistent profits on modest capital which Apple is good at.
monocasa 8y ago
Probably because Oracle has been pissing off their bread and butter for years and it's starting to bite them. Amazon got the gov cloud contract. Oracle's suing, but all they have is that someone jumped from the DoD to Amazon. https://www.nextgov.com/it-modernization/2019/02/pentagon-investigating-whether-amazon-employee-tilted-jedi-contract/155118/ https://www.nextgov.com/it-modernization/2019/02/pentagon-in... Also, I've heard stories at other .gov datacenters where they're trying to phase out Oracle as fast as they can because they're tired of their crap. Like last time I checked Oracle DB charged based on the number of CPUs you _could_ be running on. So if you have a modern env that dynamically provisions across a datacenter, then they charge for all of the cores in your datacenter.
- SteveNuts 8y ago
  You don't even have to be dynamically provisioning anything, even just standard VMware virtualization is not approved for running Oracle DB. They'll audit you and charge you for every physical CPU core connected in your vSphere cluster. It's total bullshit and their big customers are getting sick of it. Oracle audits are basically just sales tactics to get you to buy their cloud services so they can turn around and pretend they're a leader in the cloud.
  - tyingq 8y ago
    It's also a push to get you to buy Exadata/Exalytics appliances, since the lock-in is harder, and margins are bigger.
  - codewithcheese 8y ago
    How do they enforce a audit? What is to stop a company preventing them access?
    - monocasa 8y ago
      It's generally built into the contract. Don't let them audit? Lose all your licenses. A bunch of their stuff phones home too.
- 8y ago
paul7986 8y ago
It's probably too early, but Amazon (via North's AR glasses they invested in) might have beat them in terms of creating a great AR glasses experience. North Focals AR glasses in their first iteration are getting good reviews (https://duckduckgo.com/?q=north+focal+ar+glasses+reviews&t=ffab&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=north+focal+ar+glasses+reviews&t=f...) and look intriguing. Also, I tried on a pair of Bose audio AR sunglasses and was really impressed; felt obvious ... use your glasses to listen to audio from your phone, as well get audio AR info say at national monuments to wherever. Personally I'd buy AR sunglasses ones that merge North with Bose in a heartbeat. Who doesn't wear sunglasses already?
- webmobdev 8y ago
  And this has something to do with Buffet selling his Oracle shares .... ??
- karlding 8y ago
  For what it's worth, North recently laid off 150 of their employees [0] and the Canadian government is pulling their 18 million investment [1] in the company. There's some discussion about this on the /r/uwaterloo subreddit [2], as well as the regional /r/waterloo reddit. [0] https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/22/18236253/north-focals-smart-glasses-150-employee-lay-offs https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/22/18236253/north-focals-sma... [1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/22/18236695/north-focals-layoffs-canadian-government-navdeep-bains-funding https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/22/18236695/north-focals-lay... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/uwaterloo/comments/aubwpm/north_thalmic_labs_lays_off_150_employees_and/ https://www.reddit.com/r/uwaterloo/comments/aubwpm/north_tha...
  - paul7986 8y ago
    Yes, I did see this news. Also , a week before or so saw reports of the guy at Apple heading up their glasses initiative had left the company. Still North looks like a huge leap from any AR glasses out there.
- solarkraft 8y ago
  > Who doesn't wear sunglasses already? Me, for one.
tyingq 8y ago
There's also speculation that Buffet was trying to buy Southwest Airlines: http://amp.timeinc.net/fortune/2019/02/28/southwest-stock-acquisition-warren-buffett http://amp.timeinc.net/fortune/2019/02/28/southwest-stock-ac...
- stygiansonic 8y ago
  Interesting, I did not his view on airlines had changed, thanks for the link. Previously: https://www.forbes.com/sites/tedreed/2013/05/13/buffett-decries-airline-investing-even-though-at-worst-he-broke-even/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/tedreed/2013/05/13/buffett-decr...
  - pmart123 8y ago
    It did once he realized airlines are now offering additive items. When it was just a butt in a seat, airlines were crap businesses due to the capital costs, regulations, and fuel prices. With shale, it looks like the US won't have a foreign oil dependency for a long time. Meanwhile, airlines can charge you $12 for wifi, $30 for extra legroom, etc. which completely changes the economics of flying.
    - tyingq 8y ago
      Notably, Southwest doesn't currently charge for checked bags, which is probably the biggest piece of secondary revenue for other airlines. I doubt WiFi makes money for any airline. It's either satellite, which costs them a ton, or LTE, where they get a paltry revenue share. I think WiFi is more of a customer satisfaction/expectation thing.
      - DGAP 8y ago
        Eh, most airlines going for satellite WiFi aren't doing it out of the goodness of their hearts - they're doing it because the unit economics make sense. There are exceptions like JetBlue who offer it for "free" though.
dogma1138 8y ago
With Oracle essentially comiting suicide with the new Java licensing scheme this isn’t surprising. It’s the best thing that happened to OpenJDK and the much cheaper commercial alternatives based on it. I can only imagine the celebration at Azul when Oracle announced this nonsense they basically justified the business model of their competitors overnight.
- JimboOmega 8y ago
  What is the new licensing and how is it committing suicide? Last I checked everybody uses java for everything, especially Google, which then makes it ubiquitous (on Android devices, etc.)
  - dogma1138 8y ago
    This isn’t about Java as a language but about the Runtime binaries provided by Oracle. There is now a very aggressive fee structure for using Java SE/JDK in a commercial environment. https://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javaseproducts/overview/javasesubscriptionfaq-4891443.html https://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javaseproducts/overv... You will pay as much as $2.50 per user for desktop installations and as much as $25 per core for server installations, the Advanced subscription which also provides you with security updates for older versions of Java is now nearly $7000 per server per year.
    - technofiend 8y ago
      In the past companies had no clue how much of something was installed. These days with cyber security being such a concern any company with tight controls knows exactly what's on every machine. It's not hard to treat Oracle Java like a threat and red flag it during scanning. And if Oracle keeps up these shenanigans I can't help but feel like that's exactly what will happen.
      - dogma1138 8y ago
        Eh? The entire financial sector runs on Java, this isn’t about milking fees form some random companies because someone installed Java on their laptop this is milking fees form the actual key users of Java. Microsoft has signed an agreement with Azul for Java on Azure and Amazon has released their own distribution of OpenJDK as a result. The company I work for also switched to Azul since the projected cost of Oracle was in the 10s of millions due to their Advanced support costs per server. Just to put things into perspective the projected yearly licensing cost for a single trading platform for us was 21 million dollars for the Oracle Advanced service agreement, I don’t know the exact final figure but apparently Azul was less than 200K for the entire company. I simply don’t understand how Oracle thought they could get away with these fees.
arisAlexis 8y ago
He has no idea about technology. He didn't invest in Google and Amazon and he bought Apple at the absolute top. He also bought IBM and sold at a loss. He is equally mistaken with Bitcoin. It's just not his field and his moves mean nothing.
- thinkingkong 8y ago
  Whether or not they mean anything theyre signals and market making moves.
- sachindhar 8y ago
  Cost basis for Apple is in the $140s. Absolute top is $220+.
- twblalock 8y ago
  > he bought Apple at the absolute top He started buying Apple in 2016 at a little over $100 per share. He’s done well with that investment.
- pmart123 8y ago
  I agree in general with your sentiment. He not only missed those, but he comes off as ignorant versus unlucky regarding technology. His first Apple purchase price was around $90 so it was far from the top. Apple is more about consumer and brand though so I think it better fits his skill set than an enterprise software company. He did buy Verisign at $90 though too, which seems to have a pretty impressive regulated moat.
  - adventured 8y ago
    Regarding VRSN, keep in mind the distinction that not all of these buys are Warren Buffett. For example one of Buffett's investment chiefs made that AAPL purchase in the first quarter of 2016, either Ted Weschler or Todd Combs. They bought ten million shares initially.
- matchagaucho 8y ago
  He's honest enough to admit as much. From the article: "after I started buying [Oracle], I felt I still didn't understand the business. I actually changed my mind in terms of understanding it, not in terms of evaluating it. Oracle is a great business, but I don't think I understand exactly where the cloud is going."
miles_matthias 8y ago
"Buffett explained that this employee "works with a limited amount of money – $13 billion, roughly – so if he wants to buy something he needs to sell something. If I want to buy something, I have cash around to do it.""
rdegges 8y ago
This past year I spoke at Oracle's Code One conference in San Francisco for the first time. I've never used Oracle products before and had never been to an Oracle event before, but I was aware of Oracle's incredibly bad reputation in the dev community. When I got to the event it was MASSIVE. I think they have something like 30k+ attendees. As I was walking around, hanging out, and attending talks, I decided to make friends and chat up other people. This is where things got interesting. Through the 2 days I was at the event, I probably met nearly 100 developers, and when I asked all of them what they use Oracle for EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM openly told me that their companies use Oracle right now but they hate it and they were all in the process of transitioning to other providers or open source solutions. Every single person I met at Code One told me the exact same thing. That is pretty insane and I don't think it bodes well for Oracle that all of their customers are trying to find ways to get out of their ecosystem :x
- ecshafer 8y ago
  A lot of Oracle customers got oracle products 15 or 20 or more years ago. A lot of those developers, sysadmins and data base admins that have worked on oracle themselves are now into senior Management and executive positions. I wonder how much this has to do with transitions. That they know it sucks, so they are more willing to fight beyond standard "it's expensive" arguments. A bit of a shower thought, I have no evidence for this.
  - elpakal 8y ago
    Speaking from my probably limited experience compared to others here, these early Oracle adopters turned senior/management you mentioned actually are the ones I saw fighting hardest to keep Oracle around. That is all they know and all they ever have known. In some cases even lying about other technology assessments and flat out sabotage to make sure things aint change. The most vocal pushback against Oracle I saw was from people who were not early adapters and had experienced other systems.
- wtf42 8y ago
  It's not because of poor Oracle reputation, it's because of technologies. Oracle is losing database-related markets. 15-20 years ago Oracle was №1 in database-related technologies and everyone knew it. For that time they had almost perfect solutions for most database-related problems on market. But market is changing. Today they stuck with their good solutions for outdated problems and their solutions doesn't solve modern problems well. So here is my short list of modern database-related problems, for which I think Oracle is not best at: - files/data storage (today there are better non-database solutions for that, 15-20 years ago it was a good practice to store files in database), - full-text search (10-15 years ago substring search was enough, today we want complex search criterions), - consistency across data centers, - key-value cache (today we want almost instantaneous cache answers), - OLAP (there are faster solutions on market). 15-20 years ago Oracle was one and only one solution for almost all database-related business problems. Today for many modern problems there are better solutions than Oracle.
kinnth 8y ago
I think he's wrong on this one. I honestly feel apple is loosing outside of the US and that's going to be more and more important for the app developer community to go android first.
- eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago
  Apple is still capturing most of the revenue from mobile app stores because Apple users tend to spend a lot more than Android users: https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/16/apples-app-store-revenue-nearly-double-that-of-google-play-in-first-half-of-2018/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/16/apples-app-store-revenue-n... And this is despite, like you said, the install base of Android being much larger.
  - dingdongding 8y ago
    No Apple is not capturing most of the revenue from App Store. Their services revenue which is App Store + iCloud + Apple Music is their second biggest revenue stream I think after iPhone. But it still dwarfs in front of iPhone. Though services revenue is growing a lot faster.
    - eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago
      You didn't even read what I said or the link I posted. I'm comparing Apple to Android and their respective app store revenues, which is what the original comment was about. I never said Apple received most of their revenue from the app store.
microtherion 8y ago
I was going to joke that the Red Hat investment could mean that 2019 is the Year of Linux in the Portfolio, but that year was, arguably, 1999, when LNUX when public.
yingw787 8y ago
Seems to me that there's three stages to a company's life: Great to invest in, great to work for: Microsoft/Google in the early days Great to invest in, not great to work for: AT&T today Not great to invest in, not great to work for: Oracle today There's probably companies out there that are not great to invest in and great to work for, but I don't know how common it is for them to become great companies to invest in.
- anongraddebt 8y ago
  Interesting taxonomy. To the extent this maps to the growth potential of a company, I think the definition of "great to work for" is relevant. Joy Covey, Amazon's first CFO, left in 2000 (I believe) and when asked later why she left she said something about the work place being too chaotic and fast paced. She attributed the majority of this work dynamic to Amazon being an internet business. My point is just that some companies (e.g. Amazon) have work cultures typically understood as less appealing than companies (e.g. Google) with similar growth profiles and thus similar investment value profiles. ---- Covey, of course, walked out with $200M+ in Amazon stock. So, work culture could be sub par while the company is still "great to work for."
- pjc50 8y ago
  Not great to invest in, but great to work for: early-stage startups with fancy work environments but no real chance of success.
  - goldenchrome 8y ago
    Those usually end up being companies that aren't great to work for because of how dysfunctional most of them are. Fancy work environments don't make me happy, but clueless management sure makes me unhappy.
- firebones 8y ago
  This is wise. Choose a company to work for the same way you choose a company to invest in.
DeonPenny 8y ago
His explanation made so much sense. He said he didn't understand the product lol. That probably a sign to get out
- oska 8y ago
  What would have made sense is for him not to get in to the company in the first place, if he didn't understand the product.
  - valuearb 8y ago
    Certainty is only found looking backwards.
novaRom 8y ago
Can someone please ELI5 what is Oracle software? I thought it's a Java, but this thread mentions data bases. Is it something like MySQL? Do customers pay a lot for this database software or for the hosting/cloud?
- eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago
  It’s a public company that primarily makes database systems, but also other software systems with a focus on large enterprise clients. It’s all very expensive. Some of it is now cloud-based. And yes, Oracle does own Java, too.
  - slim 8y ago
    also Oracle owns MySQL
- vbezhenar 8y ago
  Today there are two major proprietary databases: Oracle and MS SQL. There was DB2, but I'm not sure if it's still relevant. And database market is huge, basically any serious enterprise software uses Oracle.
  - majewsky 8y ago
    There is also SAP HANA, so make that three. Disclosure: I work at SAP (in internal infrastructure though, so I'm not working with HANA).
  - hermitdev 8y ago
    I bet DB2/UDB is still around and kicking, if nothing more for legacy support. Theres also Sybase, but they've fairly much stagnated and jacked up their pricing, so the companies I've worked with that used Sybase either have or are working to migrate to MS SQL. There are other esoteric DBMS's, such as IMS which is still supported by IBM to the best of my knowledge (because that 40 year COBOL app still has to run).
- int_19h 8y ago
jkuria 8y ago
Hmmh, Oracle runs expensive front page Wall Street Journal Ads that say "Cut Your Amazon Bill in Half". I wonder how effective these are. I've been seeing them since at least 2015 so they must be somewhat effective. Here is what they look like (the banner on the right): https://www.oracle.com/database/autonomous-database/guaranteed.html https://www.oracle.com/database/autonomous-database/guarante... Oracle's stock is at a 5 year high! https://www.google.com/search?source=hp&ei=WOh6XJXUMIeQ0gL0j6ywCQ&q=oracle+stock+price&btnK=Google+Search&oq=oracle+stock+price&gs_l=psy-ab.3..0i131l2j0l8.339.3244..3358...0.0..0.145.1170.17j2......0....1..gws-wiz.....0.HBFX_yO_nsU https://www.google.com/search?source=hp&ei=WOh6XJXUMIeQ0gL0j...
- tabtab 8y ago
  Oracle has always relied on bold ads with bold claims. Example: https://regmedia.co.uk/2012/11/15/88_byte_oracle_large.jpg https://regmedia.co.uk/2012/11/15/88_byte_oracle_large.jpg
oldpond 8y ago
Smart man. Oracle is garbage.
utopcell 8y ago
Aah.. Oracle! The company that, when researchers benchmarked it against other DBs and found it dead slow, they made benchmarking it illegal. Why are they still around again ?
1337biz 8y ago
Is there actually some sort of a Warren Buffett deal tracker? Just some simple side/list of trades he is doing. Or what is the delay he is usually publishing them?
- Tevunah 8y ago
  13F's have Berkshire Hathaway's positions 45 days after the end of a quarter. https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?CIK=0001067983&action=getcompany https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?CIK=0001067983&acti...
pram 8y ago
Oracle is going down in flames for sure. Their cloud is an absolute joke. Disaster levels of bad. It was one of my favorite jobs though, basically a paid vacation. Thanks Larry!
chadcmulligan 8y ago
I used to be an oracle consultant, it paid really well. Now it doesn't, and their are less jobs in it. Unless I'm getting paid a lot I wouldn't use Oracle, I'd do something more interesting. Around the 2000's the number of Oracle DBA's skyrocketed, they come from India and elsewhere, so companies outsourced the Oracle work to these companies, and I believe Oracle itself is developed in large part in these countries. So the work for Oracle dried up, and wages plummeted, so I moved out of Oracle, like many others. DBA work is fairly easy to outsource, at least on paper, same with Dev work. Maybe their now paying the price of all this outsourcing to a less skilled workforce (at least initially). I no longer do Oracle work, it was a nice money spinner, now its a race to the bottom. Conversely their licensing practices are extreme, as others have mentioned, so everyone wants to get out of Oracle. Having said that, their databases are still very good, and can do anything you want without going elsewhere. Though they are being disrupted from below with many open source solutions and MSSql.
RickJWagner 8y ago
Buffett doesn't know where the cloud is going? That admission just shows that Buffett still seeks to understand the boundaries of his competency. Classic Buffett. Also, I like that he's buying Red Hat. (He won't hold it long, though. IBM is getting closer.)
sunstone 8y ago
Watching Warren learning to buy tech stocks is like watching a 4 year old learning to ride a bike. I suspect the problem is that for tech stocks the future is much less certain than in most industries and the trick is to judge before hand how things are likely to play out for a given stock given the various threads of likely technical progress over 2, 5 and 10 years.

325 points by MilnerRoute 8y ago

i don't get this. their machines are too costly. the old insane greatness has become watered down with a focus on global logistics. and what about the supply chain issues with China? what does Apple have on the horizon -- data services? an emphasis on the privacy protecting ecosystem? where is the new vision?

username223 8y ago
I don't see Apple achieving hyper-growth and becoming a $10 trillion company, but they have a solid business selling high-end hardware to people willing to pay for it with money instead of data. What does Oracle have on the horizon? Legacy enterprise support and lawsuits about Java?
- mandeepj 8y ago
  > What does Oracle have on the horizon? They could become a good force in the cloud after netsuite purchase. https://cloud.oracle.com/home https://cloud.oracle.com/home
  - ddebernardy 8y ago
    They could keep trying, I suppose. FWIW they've been in the cloud business since the 2000s. They and IBM were some of the few who were in that business early, and even then their respective reputations preceded them. (This was before XEN, widespread adoption of virtualization, and a slew of other DC techs that democratized using the cloud.) I would imagine they both got enough fortune-whatever companies onboard to earn good money, but neither are market leaders today. Just spitballing, but I'd assume their cloud customers are all companies who buy other stuff from them.
    - amacbride 8y ago
      Exactly. With the hostile takeover of PeopleSoft, Oracle bought themselves a number of huge customers who are disinclined to change ERP systems on anything other than decade-long timelines. It has evolved and is now cloud...ish, so they can certainly talk themselves into being perceived as a “leader.” (Even though they’re not really cloud-native in the way that Workday, Salesforce, or others are.)
- askafriend 8y ago
  If Apple strengthens their foothold in Health and Health related services/integrations, their marketcap will multiply from where it is now.
  - TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
    I honestly can't see Apple making this work. Health is a diverse, messy, market. Apple's schtick has always been making devices that make computing magical, and health would be a huge shift away from that. IMO the market is really looking for a a powerful all-in-one diagnostic health appliance - something like the analyser Theranos was pitching for, but which actually works, and is more comprehensive. De-industrialising health and making the personal equivalent of a diagnostic lab that could keep track of key markers, watch nutrition, exercise, and supplements, and transfer information to doctors - AI or human - would be a major breakthrough. But the technology for that doesn't exist yet. And even it becomes available it may not be affordable or portable. And because bodily fluids are involved it conflicts with the Apple image of clean minimalism. That leaves health as set of tentative fragmented tools and services which provide reassurance here and there - like the fall notification in Watch - but are a long way short of a comprehensive service. The fitness market is a more obvious choice. But if you look at Apple's record, it's not inspiring. Fitbit is a strong competitor, because Watch hasn't lived up to its potential - possibly because Apple can't decide if Watch should be a fashion statement or a personal fitness device. It doesn't really make sense to consumers to try to sell it as both. Behind all of that, I just can't see the current management team having the skill or imagination to make it happen. I think health is going to remain a side interest - a nice add-on, but not a huge new core market that Apple can expand into.
JaleDarvis 8y ago
Healthcare services using the watch. I was a doubter but the fitness rings schtick combined with a weight lifting app has me sold on it. Streaming content? The consolidated news app is interesting as well, but probably not a huge revenue stream.
- macintux 8y ago
  It will be interesting to see more and more insurance companies offering discounted/free Apple Watches. Fitness + accurate monitoring of heart activity + whatever's coming next makes for a powerful combination.
  - dogma1138 8y ago
    It’s pretty common in the U.K. where health insurance packages offer Apple Watch / Fitness trackers and gym memberships for them it’s a no brainer if even 1 out of 50 insurers would alter their lifestyle it would more than pay for itself.
johnwheeler 8y ago
Well, they make machines that are very costly and they focus on global logistics. They've also got a huge supply chain in China. You don't need a 'new vision' to make bucketloads of cash for your investors.
- hermitdev 8y ago
  Apple doesnt make phones or computers that are much more costly (from a hardware perspective) than any other brand. What they have is higher margins per unit due to branding and brand loyalty.
  - valuearb 8y ago
    No they have higher margins due to custom hardware and software added value.
bradleyjg 8y ago
At their PE ratio they don't need to have a bright shiny future of limitless growth. They just need to not be Nokia. AMZN on the other hand ...
B1FF_PSUVM 8y ago
Perhaps the same can be said about Louis Vuitton handbags, and does not stop MHLV, or whatstheirletters, from making money hand over fist.
MrScruff 8y ago
When you say the machines are too costly, who are you implying that's bad for? Presumably not investors?
- HillaryBriss 8y ago
  it's bad if a company wants to expand its customer base while potential new customers are instead buying cheaper products from competitors
  - MrScruff 8y ago
    It's also bad if you drop your ASP to the point it hits profits though.
semi-extrinsic 8y ago
At this point it's not crazy to think of people holding AAPL equally for the dividend as for expected future share price growth. It paid out dividend at 1.67% of the share price last year. That's $700+ million in dividend for Mr. Buffett, not too shabby.
thesausageking 8y ago
Apple has a lot of potential to expand into health care tech and digital therapeutics, which is a huge, growing market. They have a great brand, expertise in making consumer hardware and software, and they're one of the few large tech companies that's able to take privacy seriously.
- atomical 8y ago
  You mean consumer health care tech? From what I can see that is all about marketing and has very little to do with science. I see it more as a fad.
  - solarkraft 8y ago
    Don't they still have a bunch of unused potential in activity tracking?
  - Spooky23 8y ago
    No way. There’s a huge market for medical monitoring that is dominated by big dumb players. Your insurance pays like $3k to wear a heart monitor for a day or two.
    - adrianN 8y ago
      The problem with that huge market is not that it's somehow hard to make monitoring devices, but it's hard to get them through the bureaucratic process of being legal to use for medical purposes. Doing that is quite an orthogonal skillset to engineering.
      - Spooky23 8y ago
        A company with billions in cash can learn quickly.
  - intopieces 8y ago
    Americans are getting older. Apple released a new Apple Watch with fall detection and it was 100% of the reason 3 of my coworkers purchased one for aging parents. Health is a privacy sensitive industry and Apple is the only company that has been selling privacy as a core feature. This is squarely within Apple’s target and they will bet big on it.
Spooky23 8y ago
They print money and own many segments of smartphone that really matter. They can cruise for a decade doing nothing.
- fauigerzigerk 8y ago
  I don't think you can ever say that about any consumer electronics company. All of them are always one replacement cycle away from potential disaster. Apple has enormous margins to defend. If they cruise for a decade their margins will approach the average margins of the industry because people will no longer pay extra for the brand.
  - ck425 8y ago
    Outside of China they're not paying for the brand. They're paying for the iOS eco system and that's still a valuable moat. It remains to be seen if a super app such as WeChat will emerge in other markets but until/unless it does Apple have a pretty strong moat.
    - fauigerzigerk 8y ago
      I don't believe that this huge difference in margins is purely down to pragmatic considerations anywhere in the world.
ksec 8y ago
TL;DR - Apple is extremely healthy, with many rooms for growth or sustain its current profits / revenue. 1. Still Growing number of iPhone users, 900M as of the end of 2018. I made a prediction in 2015 / 2016 that Apple could reach the unthinkable ( At the time ) 1B iPhone user by 2020, looks like they are well on course to do that. There will be roughly ~3.5B Smartphone users world wide in 2020. Even if Apple does't grow its user base anymore. Selling to its 1B Customer, which are also the higher spending group, would still be a lucrative business that not many other company could match. 2. Health - When it comes to Health, people don't want to spend money on a brand that that cant trust. So even if company X has an exact replica of Apple Watch with exact software and function, people would still trust Apple and spend 50% or more on it. Also worth mentioning the group of people who cares about health are also likely the one who are passed mid life and has higher deposable income. And health insurance company loves these Data. I am actually surprised at how affordable Apple priced the Apple Watch S4, they could have jack up the price in US purely on the ECG function. ( I have heard many stories about parents want to buy the Apple Watch *immediately8 after reading or watching the Apple Keynote, I am also surpassed how many non-tech people actually do watch the keynote live ) 3. Services - It is a growing segment but honestly, even if Apple Attract 100M Apple Music + Apple TV Subs at $20 combined, that is only $6B per quarter, roughly 10 - 15% increase of their current revenue. It is not a huge percentage, but it is hard for Apple to grow when it is so big. I think the future is Apple offering 24+ Months of Financing ( leaving the 24 months for Carrier ) , like 36 / 48 months for iPhone, charged to their Apple Credit Card, Operated and Backed by Goldman Sachs. Bundles along with other high margin product like AppleCare+. This could potentially be the next revenue and profits growth. 4. The Mac and iPad still have yet to show their full potential. There is no reason why Apple could not gain a 200M+ Mac User base. And iPad / iPad Pro still needs to battle out the Education and Pro Segment.

nezzor 8y ago

I thought he didn’t invest in tech because it was outside his “circle of competence”?

appsonify 8y ago
2015 called
ddebernardy 8y ago
If memory serves me well, in one of the letters he sent a number of years back (10-ish?), he mentioned that they had someone in their staff managing a portfolio of stock picks and doing a great job at it, and gave a heads up to readers that they might find tech stocks come in and out of their portfolio every so often as a result. Presumably he liked the returns he was seeing and jumped in too. Also, Apple displays a number of characteristics that he reportedly likes to invest in: the business that Apple is in is straightforward to understand, the market is big and they've a strong or growing market position, they're profitable and have a big cash position, they've a strong brand and difficult to reproduce expertise (i.e. a moat).
altairiumblue 8y ago
Yes, this always struck me as strange and at the time my naive thought was that Apple was overvalued. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTd7Iax-I60 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTd7Iax-I60 What he says around 00:27 about Snickers applies very much to Apple as a brand. This is the only Buffet-ish explanation of why Berkshire would invest in Apple that I could think of. And apart from this, the decision to buy a lot of Apple stock a while back was made by other asset managers, not Warren himself, and I'm sure was the result of thorough analysis, not based on some offhand comment in an interview.
tim333 8y ago
A couple of possible points on that. Buffett is always learning and maybe he feel's he understands Apple enough now. Also to quote Buffett "If you look at Apple, I think it earns almost twice as much as the second most profitable company in the United States". Which I guess attracts him - he's always been into consistent profits on modest capital which Apple is good at.

monocasa 8y ago

Probably because Oracle has been pissing off their bread and butter for years and it's starting to bite them. Amazon got the gov cloud contract. Oracle's suing, but all they have is that someone jumped from the DoD to Amazon. https://www.nextgov.com/it-modernization/2019/02/pentagon-investigating-whether-amazon-employee-tilted-jedi-contract/155118/ https://www.nextgov.com/it-modernization/2019/02/pentagon-in... Also, I've heard stories at other .gov datacenters where they're trying to phase out Oracle as fast as they can because they're tired of their crap. Like last time I checked Oracle DB charged based on the number of CPUs you _could_ be running on. So if you have a modern env that dynamically provisions across a datacenter, then they charge for all of the cores in your datacenter.

SteveNuts 8y ago
You don't even have to be dynamically provisioning anything, even just standard VMware virtualization is not approved for running Oracle DB. They'll audit you and charge you for every physical CPU core connected in your vSphere cluster. It's total bullshit and their big customers are getting sick of it. Oracle audits are basically just sales tactics to get you to buy their cloud services so they can turn around and pretend they're a leader in the cloud.
- tyingq 8y ago
  It's also a push to get you to buy Exadata/Exalytics appliances, since the lock-in is harder, and margins are bigger.
- codewithcheese 8y ago
  How do they enforce a audit? What is to stop a company preventing them access?
  - monocasa 8y ago
    It's generally built into the contract. Don't let them audit? Lose all your licenses. A bunch of their stuff phones home too.
8y ago

paul7986 8y ago

It's probably too early, but Amazon (via North's AR glasses they invested in) might have beat them in terms of creating a great AR glasses experience. North Focals AR glasses in their first iteration are getting good reviews (https://duckduckgo.com/?q=north+focal+ar+glasses+reviews&t=ffab&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=north+focal+ar+glasses+reviews&t=f...) and look intriguing. Also, I tried on a pair of Bose audio AR sunglasses and was really impressed; felt obvious ... use your glasses to listen to audio from your phone, as well get audio AR info say at national monuments to wherever. Personally I'd buy AR sunglasses ones that merge North with Bose in a heartbeat. Who doesn't wear sunglasses already?

webmobdev 8y ago
And this has something to do with Buffet selling his Oracle shares .... ??
karlding 8y ago
For what it's worth, North recently laid off 150 of their employees [0] and the Canadian government is pulling their 18 million investment [1] in the company. There's some discussion about this on the /r/uwaterloo subreddit [2], as well as the regional /r/waterloo reddit. [0] https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/22/18236253/north-focals-smart-glasses-150-employee-lay-offs https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/22/18236253/north-focals-sma... [1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/22/18236695/north-focals-layoffs-canadian-government-navdeep-bains-funding https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/22/18236695/north-focals-lay... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/uwaterloo/comments/aubwpm/north_thalmic_labs_lays_off_150_employees_and/ https://www.reddit.com/r/uwaterloo/comments/aubwpm/north_tha...
- paul7986 8y ago
  Yes, I did see this news. Also , a week before or so saw reports of the guy at Apple heading up their glasses initiative had left the company. Still North looks like a huge leap from any AR glasses out there.
solarkraft 8y ago
> Who doesn't wear sunglasses already? Me, for one.

tyingq 8y ago

There's also speculation that Buffet was trying to buy Southwest Airlines: http://amp.timeinc.net/fortune/2019/02/28/southwest-stock-acquisition-warren-buffett http://amp.timeinc.net/fortune/2019/02/28/southwest-stock-ac...

stygiansonic 8y ago
Interesting, I did not his view on airlines had changed, thanks for the link. Previously: https://www.forbes.com/sites/tedreed/2013/05/13/buffett-decries-airline-investing-even-though-at-worst-he-broke-even/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/tedreed/2013/05/13/buffett-decr...
- pmart123 8y ago
  It did once he realized airlines are now offering additive items. When it was just a butt in a seat, airlines were crap businesses due to the capital costs, regulations, and fuel prices. With shale, it looks like the US won't have a foreign oil dependency for a long time. Meanwhile, airlines can charge you $12 for wifi, $30 for extra legroom, etc. which completely changes the economics of flying.
  - tyingq 8y ago
    Notably, Southwest doesn't currently charge for checked bags, which is probably the biggest piece of secondary revenue for other airlines. I doubt WiFi makes money for any airline. It's either satellite, which costs them a ton, or LTE, where they get a paltry revenue share. I think WiFi is more of a customer satisfaction/expectation thing.
    - DGAP 8y ago
      Eh, most airlines going for satellite WiFi aren't doing it out of the goodness of their hearts - they're doing it because the unit economics make sense. There are exceptions like JetBlue who offer it for "free" though.

dogma1138 8y ago

With Oracle essentially comiting suicide with the new Java licensing scheme this isn’t surprising. It’s the best thing that happened to OpenJDK and the much cheaper commercial alternatives based on it. I can only imagine the celebration at Azul when Oracle announced this nonsense they basically justified the business model of their competitors overnight.

JimboOmega 8y ago
What is the new licensing and how is it committing suicide? Last I checked everybody uses java for everything, especially Google, which then makes it ubiquitous (on Android devices, etc.)
- dogma1138 8y ago
  This isn’t about Java as a language but about the Runtime binaries provided by Oracle. There is now a very aggressive fee structure for using Java SE/JDK in a commercial environment. https://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javaseproducts/overview/javasesubscriptionfaq-4891443.html https://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javaseproducts/overv... You will pay as much as $2.50 per user for desktop installations and as much as $25 per core for server installations, the Advanced subscription which also provides you with security updates for older versions of Java is now nearly $7000 per server per year.
  - technofiend 8y ago
    In the past companies had no clue how much of something was installed. These days with cyber security being such a concern any company with tight controls knows exactly what's on every machine. It's not hard to treat Oracle Java like a threat and red flag it during scanning. And if Oracle keeps up these shenanigans I can't help but feel like that's exactly what will happen.
    - dogma1138 8y ago
      Eh? The entire financial sector runs on Java, this isn’t about milking fees form some random companies because someone installed Java on their laptop this is milking fees form the actual key users of Java. Microsoft has signed an agreement with Azul for Java on Azure and Amazon has released their own distribution of OpenJDK as a result. The company I work for also switched to Azul since the projected cost of Oracle was in the 10s of millions due to their Advanced support costs per server. Just to put things into perspective the projected yearly licensing cost for a single trading platform for us was 21 million dollars for the Oracle Advanced service agreement, I don’t know the exact final figure but apparently Azul was less than 200K for the entire company. I simply don’t understand how Oracle thought they could get away with these fees.

arisAlexis 8y ago

He has no idea about technology. He didn't invest in Google and Amazon and he bought Apple at the absolute top. He also bought IBM and sold at a loss. He is equally mistaken with Bitcoin. It's just not his field and his moves mean nothing.

thinkingkong 8y ago
Whether or not they mean anything theyre signals and market making moves.
sachindhar 8y ago
Cost basis for Apple is in the $140s. Absolute top is $220+.
twblalock 8y ago
> he bought Apple at the absolute top He started buying Apple in 2016 at a little over $100 per share. He’s done well with that investment.
pmart123 8y ago
I agree in general with your sentiment. He not only missed those, but he comes off as ignorant versus unlucky regarding technology. His first Apple purchase price was around $90 so it was far from the top. Apple is more about consumer and brand though so I think it better fits his skill set than an enterprise software company. He did buy Verisign at $90 though too, which seems to have a pretty impressive regulated moat.
- adventured 8y ago
  Regarding VRSN, keep in mind the distinction that not all of these buys are Warren Buffett. For example one of Buffett's investment chiefs made that AAPL purchase in the first quarter of 2016, either Ted Weschler or Todd Combs. They bought ten million shares initially.
matchagaucho 8y ago
He's honest enough to admit as much. From the article: "after I started buying [Oracle], I felt I still didn't understand the business. I actually changed my mind in terms of understanding it, not in terms of evaluating it. Oracle is a great business, but I don't think I understand exactly where the cloud is going."

miles_matthias 8y ago

"Buffett explained that this employee "works with a limited amount of money – $13 billion, roughly – so if he wants to buy something he needs to sell something. If I want to buy something, I have cash around to do it.""

rdegges 8y ago

This past year I spoke at Oracle's Code One conference in San Francisco for the first time. I've never used Oracle products before and had never been to an Oracle event before, but I was aware of Oracle's incredibly bad reputation in the dev community. When I got to the event it was MASSIVE. I think they have something like 30k+ attendees. As I was walking around, hanging out, and attending talks, I decided to make friends and chat up other people. This is where things got interesting. Through the 2 days I was at the event, I probably met nearly 100 developers, and when I asked all of them what they use Oracle for EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM openly told me that their companies use Oracle right now but they hate it and they were all in the process of transitioning to other providers or open source solutions. Every single person I met at Code One told me the exact same thing. That is pretty insane and I don't think it bodes well for Oracle that all of their customers are trying to find ways to get out of their ecosystem :x

ecshafer 8y ago
A lot of Oracle customers got oracle products 15 or 20 or more years ago. A lot of those developers, sysadmins and data base admins that have worked on oracle themselves are now into senior Management and executive positions. I wonder how much this has to do with transitions. That they know it sucks, so they are more willing to fight beyond standard "it's expensive" arguments. A bit of a shower thought, I have no evidence for this.
- elpakal 8y ago
  Speaking from my probably limited experience compared to others here, these early Oracle adopters turned senior/management you mentioned actually are the ones I saw fighting hardest to keep Oracle around. That is all they know and all they ever have known. In some cases even lying about other technology assessments and flat out sabotage to make sure things aint change. The most vocal pushback against Oracle I saw was from people who were not early adapters and had experienced other systems.
wtf42 8y ago
It's not because of poor Oracle reputation, it's because of technologies. Oracle is losing database-related markets. 15-20 years ago Oracle was №1 in database-related technologies and everyone knew it. For that time they had almost perfect solutions for most database-related problems on market. But market is changing. Today they stuck with their good solutions for outdated problems and their solutions doesn't solve modern problems well. So here is my short list of modern database-related problems, for which I think Oracle is not best at: - files/data storage (today there are better non-database solutions for that, 15-20 years ago it was a good practice to store files in database), - full-text search (10-15 years ago substring search was enough, today we want complex search criterions), - consistency across data centers, - key-value cache (today we want almost instantaneous cache answers), - OLAP (there are faster solutions on market). 15-20 years ago Oracle was one and only one solution for almost all database-related business problems. Today for many modern problems there are better solutions than Oracle.

kinnth 8y ago

I think he's wrong on this one. I honestly feel apple is loosing outside of the US and that's going to be more and more important for the app developer community to go android first.

eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago
Apple is still capturing most of the revenue from mobile app stores because Apple users tend to spend a lot more than Android users: https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/16/apples-app-store-revenue-nearly-double-that-of-google-play-in-first-half-of-2018/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/16/apples-app-store-revenue-n... And this is despite, like you said, the install base of Android being much larger.
- dingdongding 8y ago
  No Apple is not capturing most of the revenue from App Store. Their services revenue which is App Store + iCloud + Apple Music is their second biggest revenue stream I think after iPhone. But it still dwarfs in front of iPhone. Though services revenue is growing a lot faster.
  - eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago
    You didn't even read what I said or the link I posted. I'm comparing Apple to Android and their respective app store revenues, which is what the original comment was about. I never said Apple received most of their revenue from the app store.

microtherion 8y ago

I was going to joke that the Red Hat investment could mean that 2019 is the Year of Linux in the Portfolio, but that year was, arguably, 1999, when LNUX when public.

yingw787 8y ago

Seems to me that there's three stages to a company's life: Great to invest in, great to work for: Microsoft/Google in the early days Great to invest in, not great to work for: AT&T today Not great to invest in, not great to work for: Oracle today There's probably companies out there that are not great to invest in and great to work for, but I don't know how common it is for them to become great companies to invest in.

anongraddebt 8y ago
Interesting taxonomy. To the extent this maps to the growth potential of a company, I think the definition of "great to work for" is relevant. Joy Covey, Amazon's first CFO, left in 2000 (I believe) and when asked later why she left she said something about the work place being too chaotic and fast paced. She attributed the majority of this work dynamic to Amazon being an internet business. My point is just that some companies (e.g. Amazon) have work cultures typically understood as less appealing than companies (e.g. Google) with similar growth profiles and thus similar investment value profiles. ---- Covey, of course, walked out with $200M+ in Amazon stock. So, work culture could be sub par while the company is still "great to work for."
pjc50 8y ago
Not great to invest in, but great to work for: early-stage startups with fancy work environments but no real chance of success.
- goldenchrome 8y ago
  Those usually end up being companies that aren't great to work for because of how dysfunctional most of them are. Fancy work environments don't make me happy, but clueless management sure makes me unhappy.
firebones 8y ago
This is wise. Choose a company to work for the same way you choose a company to invest in.

DeonPenny 8y ago

His explanation made so much sense. He said he didn't understand the product lol. That probably a sign to get out

oska 8y ago
What would have made sense is for him not to get in to the company in the first place, if he didn't understand the product.
- valuearb 8y ago
  Certainty is only found looking backwards.

novaRom 8y ago

Can someone please ELI5 what is Oracle software? I thought it's a Java, but this thread mentions data bases. Is it something like MySQL? Do customers pay a lot for this database software or for the hosting/cloud?

eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago
It’s a public company that primarily makes database systems, but also other software systems with a focus on large enterprise clients. It’s all very expensive. Some of it is now cloud-based. And yes, Oracle does own Java, too.
- slim 8y ago
  also Oracle owns MySQL
vbezhenar 8y ago
Today there are two major proprietary databases: Oracle and MS SQL. There was DB2, but I'm not sure if it's still relevant. And database market is huge, basically any serious enterprise software uses Oracle.
- majewsky 8y ago
  There is also SAP HANA, so make that three. Disclosure: I work at SAP (in internal infrastructure though, so I'm not working with HANA).
- hermitdev 8y ago
  I bet DB2/UDB is still around and kicking, if nothing more for legacy support. Theres also Sybase, but they've fairly much stagnated and jacked up their pricing, so the companies I've worked with that used Sybase either have or are working to migrate to MS SQL. There are other esoteric DBMS's, such as IMS which is still supported by IBM to the best of my knowledge (because that 40 year COBOL app still has to run).
int_19h 8y ago

jkuria 8y ago

Hmmh, Oracle runs expensive front page Wall Street Journal Ads that say "Cut Your Amazon Bill in Half". I wonder how effective these are. I've been seeing them since at least 2015 so they must be somewhat effective. Here is what they look like (the banner on the right): https://www.oracle.com/database/autonomous-database/guaranteed.html https://www.oracle.com/database/autonomous-database/guarante... Oracle's stock is at a 5 year high! https://www.google.com/search?source=hp&ei=WOh6XJXUMIeQ0gL0j6ywCQ&q=oracle+stock+price&btnK=Google+Search&oq=oracle+stock+price&gs_l=psy-ab.3..0i131l2j0l8.339.3244..3358...0.0..0.145.1170.17j2......0....1..gws-wiz.....0.HBFX_yO_nsU https://www.google.com/search?source=hp&ei=WOh6XJXUMIeQ0gL0j...

tabtab 8y ago
Oracle has always relied on bold ads with bold claims. Example: https://regmedia.co.uk/2012/11/15/88_byte_oracle_large.jpg https://regmedia.co.uk/2012/11/15/88_byte_oracle_large.jpg

oldpond 8y ago

Smart man. Oracle is garbage.

utopcell 8y ago

Aah.. Oracle! The company that, when researchers benchmarked it against other DBs and found it dead slow, they made benchmarking it illegal. Why are they still around again ?

1337biz 8y ago

Is there actually some sort of a Warren Buffett deal tracker? Just some simple side/list of trades he is doing. Or what is the delay he is usually publishing them?

Tevunah 8y ago
13F's have Berkshire Hathaway's positions 45 days after the end of a quarter. https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?CIK=0001067983&action=getcompany https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?CIK=0001067983&acti...

pram 8y ago

Oracle is going down in flames for sure. Their cloud is an absolute joke. Disaster levels of bad. It was one of my favorite jobs though, basically a paid vacation. Thanks Larry!

chadcmulligan 8y ago

I used to be an oracle consultant, it paid really well. Now it doesn't, and their are less jobs in it. Unless I'm getting paid a lot I wouldn't use Oracle, I'd do something more interesting. Around the 2000's the number of Oracle DBA's skyrocketed, they come from India and elsewhere, so companies outsourced the Oracle work to these companies, and I believe Oracle itself is developed in large part in these countries. So the work for Oracle dried up, and wages plummeted, so I moved out of Oracle, like many others. DBA work is fairly easy to outsource, at least on paper, same with Dev work. Maybe their now paying the price of all this outsourcing to a less skilled workforce (at least initially). I no longer do Oracle work, it was a nice money spinner, now its a race to the bottom. Conversely their licensing practices are extreme, as others have mentioned, so everyone wants to get out of Oracle. Having said that, their databases are still very good, and can do anything you want without going elsewhere. Though they are being disrupted from below with many open source solutions and MSSql.

RickJWagner 8y ago

Buffett doesn't know where the cloud is going? That admission just shows that Buffett still seeks to understand the boundaries of his competency. Classic Buffett. Also, I like that he's buying Red Hat. (He won't hold it long, though. IBM is getting closer.)

sunstone 8y ago

Watching Warren learning to buy tech stocks is like watching a 4 year old learning to ride a bike. I suspect the problem is that for tech stocks the future is much less certain than in most industries and the trick is to judge before hand how things are likely to play out for a given stock given the various threads of likely technical progress over 2, 5 and 10 years.