Billionaire Buffett's Berkshire liquidates $2.1bn stake in Oracle – months after buying the shares

Oracle's share prices took a buffeting last night after it was revealed billionaire Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway had ditched its $2.1bn stake in Big Red. The divestment was revealed in the firm's latest SEC filing, which lists stock at the end of the third quarter, 31 December 2018, and had a Big Red hole. The move is …

[Anonymous Coward]

Oracle is still a money-squeezing machine, but that's all it knows how to do. At some point it will have squeezed all it can from the parts of companies that it still has a grip on.

In the past they had products that customers had to buy, despite the warning signs. Without a constant pace of must-have advances, Oracle can't overcome the danger signs to using anything they are involved with.

[Anonymous Coward]

At some point it will have squeezed all it can from the parts of companies that it still has a grip on.

Changing your ERP is a big, expensive, high risk choice for large corporations. They'll mostly swallow any higher invoice that Leisure Suit Larry sends them, and there's ample opportunity by ridiculous changes to licence conditions, punitive software audits, withdrawing support from older software, or charging shed-loads for industry standard system changes. SAP are no different, I'd guess Infor and their ilk are no different.

If and when that doesn't work, Oracle will do what all fading tech businesses do: Use their vast cash pile to buy turnover in the shape of digestible companies in similar business lines. Then, integrate and crush it, act surprised, blame the acquired company, but something else. HP and IBM have been doing this for years, and it has mostly worked (for the directors).

[Multivac]

They bought and ran down Sun Microsystems pretty comprehensively, you never hear of Solaris these days and other then those gawd awful Exa systems we rarely hear anything about the hardware.

[Robert Halloran]

It's pretty much a given that Larry bought out Sun intending to monetize Java; the scuttlebutt at the time was that Oracle had come in only wanting the software side of Sun, but McNealy & co insisted on them buying the whole package.

Given the spectacular failure Oracle's had re: squeezing cash out of dog+world for Java, and the apparent failure to squeeze the Googleplex for the Java API copying in Android (thankfully for the sake of future reverse engineering...), you see last quarter how they've basically pushed most folks over to OpenJDK vs. their own release. My Current Employer, while having Oracle support, is wrangling how best to deal with all the third-party kit coming in built to OpenJDK vs. Oracle and whether to go with the flow and jump over themselves.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oracle stock has gone up nicely recently, but always drops in March after the quarterly results. I imagine he's made a tidy profit, and cashing out just in time.

[devTrail]

IBM -> Red Hat

So, I understood that Buffet sold IBM and bought Red Hat, but the timing is not clear. Did he know in advance something about the deal and did he make a lot of money out of it? Or did he just buy the shares alongside all the others who jumped in lately?

[Dwarf]

I wait for the day ...

There are two companies I'll celebrate - when they fail.

One is Oracle, the other is Microsoft.

Now what was that definition of ORACLE again ... One Raging ...

[Chz]

Re: I wait for the day ...

Microsoft, the modern entity, I have a hard time hating. I don't *like* them, but they've left their worst practices in the past. And they actually have some half-decent software and hardware lines. I was actually put out that they canned the Windows Phone, because it ran so well on low-end hardware and I wanted it to grab a toehold just for that.

[werdsmith]

Re: I wait for the day ...

Yes Microsoft have definitely been out-baddied lately. And now the plucky upstart darlings and downtrodden heroes of yesteryear are now becoming the object of hate.

Oracle have always been nasty of course. Parasitic business with negative synergy, holding companies to ransom. I don't dare touch anything so tainted such as Java or or what used to be attractive software such as MySQL or VirtualBox.

[devTrail]

Re: I wait for the day ...

... but they've left their worst practices in the past.

1) If you look all the PCs and laptops on sale you'll find out that all of them are running on Windows. You can find some laptops with Linux online or you can assemble your own PC, but non technical people don't have a lot of choice. Here Microsoft is still a monopoly.

2) Every new version of Office produces files that are incompatible with the current LibreOffice/Open Office versions. It's an endless race every time you update LibreOffice you see it reducing the mess up in the formatting of the word documents you open and suddenly it goes back to square one, it matters when public offices tell you you have to download some forms, fill them, print them and send them back and they don't provide PDF files.

[W.S.Gosset]

Re: I wait for the day ...

RTF

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: I wait for the day ...

they've left their worst practices in the past

LOL. That's about as believable as Google's "Do no evil".

It'll take a fair amount of bleach for a leopard to erase its spots, and they'll come back. They've gotten fat and lazy, and I cannot see them change. That said, I've only been watching this outfit for some 3 decades..

Show me Microsoft fully supporting Open Standards (and by that I mean properly supporting to the point of full integration, not the weak "me too" efforts that somehow never quite work unless it's all Microsoft) and I may uncross my arms and pay attention. So far, I have seen nothing that won't allow them to roll back their *cough* generosity *cough* if it doesn't bring them enough income.

Oh, apropos Google: same modus operandi, they're just a bit more intelligent about it.

[W.S.Gosset]

Re: I wait for the day ...

You appear to have no idea of what Microsoft used to be like. MS now is just another standard company. Back when Billiam was in psycho rule-the-world mode, they destroyed so much tech and so many companies it was eye-watering. BG realised the US legal system is even more of a bully&bluff regime than normal, and he went for it. Hey, if you've personally inherited the current$ equivalent of quarter of a billion dollars, you can do stuff other people find too risky. Why do you think he dropped out of Harvard? Even then, Billiam panicked and ran back, but Paul Allen realised he was onto a good thing and dragged Billiam back out.

Then Billiam just went into overdrive on winning the game by the actual rules rather than the nominal rules.

e.g. writing into contracts that the contractee is forbidden to comply with DoJ/police/etc demands, eg sub-poenas. And the contractees, facing immediate bankruptcy, refusing to comply...

e.g. announcing MS is "developing the same thing" immediately after any competitor's announcement, immediately evaporating immediate demand for said competitor's product as everyone waits to be able to compare the two products. Competitor dries up, goes bankrupt.

e.g. MS got done for breach of the AntiTrust Act after 4+yrs work by the DoJ (!!! extraordinarily difficult since the only penalty available is destruction of the company), overturned it on appeal in a single day on a technical legal matter which required the judge to exclude all evidence.

e.g. .net only exists as a legal prep. countermove to ensure Actual control vs Nominal control when it looked like he was going to lose the next antitrust case. He won that, so .net dribbled off to become a random library/framework, rather than the Windows replacement it was intended to be.

I could go on. And on...

.

Basically, Billiam eventually got bored. Like a wargamer happily smashing everything on the board because he started with so many more pieces via a lucky roll, takes over the board, eventually gets bored with doing the same thing over and over. Stepped away. Handed off to the corporate parasites like Ballmer.

MS for the last 15+yrs has been Just Another Normal Corporate, only with a sharply better internal programmer culture. It actually is not Evil any more.

... that's not the same thing as Doing The Ideal Thing Always, of course...