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Berkshire Hathaway Inc.
- Bukhmanizer 4y agoIt’s weird that the “message from Warren Buffett” is an ad for Geico and a jewelry brand. I get that they’re subsidiaries but still.
- lupire 4y agoWhy? He owns those companies.
- Bukhmanizer 4y agoI guess it would be like Bill Gates advertising for Windows and Xbox at the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation. Like I get the incentive but it doesn’t seem like the right place for it
- kube-system 4y agoThey’re not Buffet’s side hustle. They’re Berkshire subsidiaries. It’s more like Microsoft’s website having an ad for an GitHub or LinkedIn on it.
- Bukhmanizer 4y agoTo be clear I think the weirdnesses is in the pseudo-personal tone of it. This isn’t your uncle trying to sell you on his new business during thanksgiving dinner. This is a billionaire trying to sell low low prices to presumably investors.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- kube-system 4y agoThat’s kind of Buffet’s thing. “Value” is a big philosophy of his, in investing and in business strategy, and many of his followers believe the same.
- JadeNB 4y agoOr like Google's home page advertising Chrome (which they did early on in its life, which was surely a big factor in how they grew their market share so fast).
- szundi 4y agoNo, it is like Microsoft advertising Linkedin on their website. They own it.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- paulluuk 4y agoI assumed this was a fake website that was trying to get people to buy dodgy insurance "because Warren Buffet recommends it".
- mdasen 4y agoIt's very on-brand for Buffett if you follow his stuff. He's always kinda hawking the stuff he owns. You'll see the can of Coke on the table at the annual meeting, you'll see him eating See's Candies, he'll talk about the brands he owns, etc. It's not pushy or overly sales-like, but he is into a lot of the stuff he owns. The message about GEICO is really frank: different insurance carriers vary in their underwriting judgments, but he estimates that GEICO will offer the lowest rate for 40% of people which is more often than any carrier. Go to the website and see if you can save money. For some of the businesses, it can be a bit personal. He bought Nebraska Furniture Mart over a handshake from someone he'd known for a long time. It is a little weird, but it's certainly on-brand for him.
- kayamon 4y agoHe really is the world's best door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman. His advice on how to make money is basically that you should give some to him. Sometimes you just have to stand back and clap.
- Scoundreller 4y agoDid a View Source on their table of quarterly/annual reports, and there it is: <meta name=Generator content="Microsoft Word 15"> <meta name=Originator content="Microsoft Word 15"> That equates to Office 2013
- dazc 4y agoI think this has been posted multiple times but, yeah, they are never going to succeed with a website like this.
- mdp2021 4y agoThose whose work pushes for a Liberace-and-spotlight outfit and those brought to a kuroi apparel.
- api 4y agoYou don’t need a flashy site if you already have the reputation. But without other signals an old simple site will be interpreted by many as an indicator of something amateurish or outdated.
- ratsmack 4y ago>flashy site But sometimes there's so much flash that you can't even tell what's being sold. And then there is the immediate blatant pop-over that demands that you make an account before you even have a chance to see the product. Who designs crap like that?
- alasdair_ 4y agoMaybe. I once raised a seed round with a dirt-simple (deliberately) deck that was just black and white text, Times New Roman default powerpoint style with zero design elements other than bullet points. I got a lot of comments about how refreshing it was to just let the ideas and data stand for themselves without frills. I accept that a deck and a website are not the same thing, but there is value in sometimes deliberately under-designing something.
- bernardv 4y agoThey have no need for glitzy smoke and mirrors. Love it.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- indus 4y agobut their annual meeting is five hours :-)
- johnorourke 4y agoWhat a great example of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."
- dweekly 4y agoSee also: Craigslist
- jamiek88 4y agoAnd hacker news. I just want bigger upvote and collapse thread buttons!!
- 8ytecoder 4y agoIt’s extremely hard to read on mobile though.
- JYellensFuckboy 4y agoI'd be curious to know how many people access the Berkshire Hathaway website from a phone. If they do get any mobile traffic, I wouldn't be terribly surprised if it's from more BlackBerries than iPhones.
- allie1 4y agoSo would they, but no Google Analytics, so they will have to rely on customizing their web server logs to capture user agent xD
- amin 4y ago“The more beautiful the brochure, the more skeptical you should be.” - popular saying amongst Dutch investors
- Scoundreller 4y agoObviously the trick is to own the companies that sell with the beautiful brochures, as is the case here. 40% of BH's publicly-traded holdings are AAPL stock. 11% is Bank of America. 9% is Chevron. 7% is Coca Cola. https://www.cnbc.com/berkshire-hathaway-portfolio/ https://www.cnbc.com/berkshire-hathaway-portfolio/ You could replicate 84% of the publicly-traded side of BH with 8 US-based holdings. But BH trades at 1.5x price to book... not sure if it's really worth it. But there's some VC-style genius in his non-trading holdings (e.g. GEICO and railways) directly held on its book or its <1% public holdings. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/BRK-A/key-statistics/ https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/BRK-A/key-statistics/ (Though the asset value of the railroads, railcars, energy, pipelines, etc. (not even including liabilities) is about equal to its AAPL holdings, which is all asset/equity). Overall, if you want a set-and-forget investment, I'd still say go for BH stock.
- de_keyboard 4y agoI think that BH has underperformed the S&P500 for some time now. They are also quite old now - what happens to the share price after they pass?
- SamReidHughes 4y agoUnless I goofed in looking up this information, BH has outperformed the S&P 500 since 10 years ago and since 5 years ago, and that's with the S&P's dividendends reinvested. A few years ago I think it was different, but then they made a lot of money on Apple.
- yuvalkarmi 4y agoWhy is there a Geico ad on the site?
- Waterluvian 4y agoIn my opinion a ton of class and prestige is lost by putting an ad on a front page. So it must yield their subsidiary huge returns to be “worth” it. Disclaimer: am not a billionaire.
- richardw 4y agoClass and prestige is exactly what Buffett is not about. He does not care at all about opinions of his website. He cares only if the money goes up and credibility is maintained. Any focus on the site would be a waste of money, unless you can make a buck. Same dude loves buying hail damaged cars. This is a hail damaged website. Works fine. Sells insurance while you’re there.
- Waterluvian 4y agoThat is a good point. Teacher, I’d like to change my answer.
- twiceaday 4y agoBerkshire owns Geico.
- foobarian 4y agoProbably pays more than enough to run that site
- miobrien 4y agoGEICO is a wholly owned subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway that provides coverage for more than 24 million motor vehicles owned by more than 15 million policy holders as of 2017.
- throwthere 4y agoSEO. Really.
- miobrien 4y agoI wish more websites/companies realized how effective, practical, and beautiful this design is.
- Waterluvian 4y agoI want to make websites like this and run into the same problem every time: phones exist now. The website is illegible on my phone. I have to do some zooming and panning and it feels awful. It’s difficult to have a nice “classic web” page that runs on phones without a lot of care to use media queries. Not that that’s a deal breaker but it quickly departs from the “keep it simple” philosophy of these designs when you are effectively designing it twice.
- 10000truths 4y ago> The website is illegible on my phone. I have to do some zooming and panning and it feels awful. I see this complaint often, but I don’t get it. Zooming and panning are two dead simple gestures on any smartphone browser, no more difficult than scrolling. Out of all the annoyances I’ve encountered visiting a website on my smartphone, having to zoom or pan ranks near the bottom for me. Why is it such a nuisance for others?
- Waterluvian 4y agoRequires more than my thumb. So now I have to alter my entire ergonomics of phone usage for a page. Double tap can sometimes work. The other issue is that now the website has two overflow axes. So I’m just kinda wandering a page in some way that wasn’t designed by the author. To each their own but it feels janky and uncomfortable to have to wander a page. Especially if the page was designed with a certain viewport size in mind. They’re not expecting this case.
- lvass 4y agoI tried it on firefox's Ctrl+shift+m, 250x300 looks bad but at 600x500 it's great. What phones are smaller than this now?
- samwillis 4y agoI wander if you look at "website bytes" to market cap as a metric, these might be most valuable bytes? (That's if you ignore the websites of subsidies)
- shreyshnaccount 4y agoThis type of website, with just the addition responsive text, is how most of the internet should ideally be.
- nickelpro 4y agoPlease no, I like interesting and engaging design
- DiggyJohnson 4y agoI just don’t see much “interesting and engaging design” that isn’t riddled with horrible performance or ridiculous dark patterns. The Reddit redesign is a perfect example of the former, and newsletter popups are an example of the latter.
- semicolon_storm 4y agoThe problem is when interesting and engaging design starts taking priority over functionality. This is fine for entertainment focused sites that are meant to capture your attention and help you burn some time. This is terrible for sites that fulfill some real purpose. For example, I don't want my healthcare website to have a flashy design, I want it to just work in a reliable way.
- JYellensFuckboy 4y agoThis web design reminds me a lot of when Apple "bravely" removed the 3.5mm AUX jack from the iPhone. Everyone scorned and mocked their simplified design, then copied it a year later. However, I don't know if there's anything equivalent to forcing companies to make better Bluetooth headsets in this case - maybe making people appreciate big fonts more?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- johnywalks 4y agoI don't know. I really enjoy 10 popups when i visit a website.
- prpl 4y agoNice pun in there about the WEB page.
- PaulWaldman 4y agoI love that it looks like it hasn't been updated in 30 years, yet the copyright date indicates 2022.
- acqbu 4y agoIs the website coded and maintained by Buffet himself?
- heratyian 4y agoI visited their corporate HQ in Omaha last summer. No signs on the building. No indication it's one of the most valuable companies in the world.
- karaterobot 4y agoThe most recent news post is about https://berkshirehathawaytx.com/ https://berkshirehathawaytx.com/, a crypto exchange that is obviously trying to use the brand. The TX evidently stands for Texas, don't you know.
- osigurdson 4y agoI get it, but I don't think many companies could get away with this. The site is for serious investors and simplicity is part of the brand. Imagine miro.com (whatever that is but I've seen lots of ads for in on YouTube), using this type of style - it seems unlikely that it would be successful. I'd like to see someone try however.
- PaulWaldman 4y agoUh oh! Check out the Legal Disclaimer. >Reproduction or distribution of any materials obtained on this website or linking to this website without written permission is prohibited. Linking to this website without written permission is strictly prohibited. Really hope meesterdude obtained said required written permission prior posting.
- indigodaddy 4y agoWould seem hard to enforce or unenforceable. Was that ever even a thing where a website could disallow linking to it?
- JadeNB 4y ago> Was that ever even a thing where a website could disallow linking to it? There have been lawsuits about it! See, for example, https://www.seroundtable.com/linkage-lawsuit-15131.html https://www.seroundtable.com/linkage-lawsuit-15131.html (the first useful hit in a Google search for "lawsuit about linking"), and a survey article https://btlj.org/data/articles2015/vol16/16_3/16-berkeley-tech-l-j-1273-1344.pdf https://btlj.org/data/articles2015/vol16/16_3/16-berkeley-te... by Mark Sableman.
- iamben 4y agoI had a bunch of sites on a shared host a while back. I got an email from the hosting company saying they'd had a legal notification from a site I was linking to that demanded I removed links to their website or they'd take legal action against the host (and me by extension?!). Despite me pointing out the ridiculousness of the situation, as well as the SEO benefit to the original site no one would listen and it ended as "remove the links in the next 48 hours or we take down your sites until you do." Wasn't worth the fight, so I removed them. Still can't get over the waste of resources and the ridiculousness of the whole thing.
- entropicgravity 4y agoMove your hosting to the Google cloud and let these guys bang on Google's door for a few years.
- yieldcrv 4y agoWhy is "WEB" capitalized there something something the 90s?
- BRKB 4y agoWarren E. Buffett (WEB) ... It's a joke.
- JYellensFuckboy 4y agoNormally I loathe Geico ads with every fiber of my being, but that little guy at the bottom of the page is so cute!
- BRKB 4y agoOn the other hand, Berkshire Hathaway is Apple's largest investor. Berkshire Hathaway Energy owns and operates some of the world's largest wind and solar energy farms and is building state-of-the-art Terrapower (Bill Gates) nuclear reactors: https://www.brkenergy.com/ https://www.brkenergy.com/ There's a lot for a "tech investor" to like about the company. As a consequence, Berkshire has a top-notch subreddit, probably the best subreddit of any company: r/brkb (https://old.reddit.com/r/brkb/ https://old.reddit.com/r/brkb/) Other investors will appreciate that Berkshire owns all of a large part of America's freight transportation system: https://www.bnsf.com/ https://www.bnsf.com/ And is the largest investor in important parts of its financial system (Bank of America), etc.