From: Warren Buffet [warreneb@ix-netcom.com]
Sent: Thursday, August 21 1997 3:13 PM
To: Jeff Raikes
Subject: Re: Go Huskers!
hi, jeff;
i have so few friends who use e-mail that I only look for it once a week
or so (and usually find nothing) so excuse the slowness in responding. I
am also reasonably fast at typing but poor in the accuracy department
and fine it easier just to plow ahead rather than correct, knowing i am
always writing to those who will find a little deciphering an
interesting but easy challenge.
I am afraid you have the Husker-Husky situation correctly handicapped.
We need a miracle and it’s unlikely to happen in a stadium in which
Frost will not be able to hear a word he shouts. I hope Osborne has had
him working on hand signals all summer.
Your analysis of Microsoft, why i should invest in it, and why I dont
could not be more on the money. In effect the company has a royalty on a
communication stream that can do nothing but grow. It’s as if you were
getting paid for every gallon of water starting in a small stream but
with added amounts received as tributaries turned the stream into an
Amazon. The toughest question is how hard to push prices and I wrote a
note to Bill on that after our December meeting last year. Bell should
have anticipated Bill and let someone else put in the phone
infrastructure while he collected by the minute and distance (and even
importance of the call if he could have figured a wait to monitor it) in
perpetuity.
Coke is now getting a royalty on swallows; probably 7.2 billion a day if
these average gulp is one ounce. I feel 100% sure (perhaps mistakenly)
that I know the odds of this continuing-again 100% as long as cola
doesnt cause cancer. Bill has an even better royalty-one which I would
never bet against but i dont feel i am capable of assessing
probabilities about, except to the extent that with a gun to my head and
forced to make a guess, i would go with it rather than against. But to
calibratre whether my certainty is 80% or 55%, say, for a 20-year run
would be folly, if I had to make such decisions, i would do my best but
I prefer to structure investing as a no-called-strikes game and just
wait for the fat one/
I watched Ted Williams on cable the other day and he referred to a book
called the science of hitting which i then ran down. It has a drawing of
the batters box in it that he had referred to on the show with lots of
little squares in it, all parts of the strike zone. In his favorite
spot, the box showed .400 reflecting what he felt he would hit if he
only swung at pitches in that area. Low and outsided, but still in the
strike zone, he got down to .260. Of course, if he had two strikes on
him, he was going to swing at that .260 pitch but otherwise he waited
for one in the "happy zone" as he put it. I think the same approach
makes sense in investing. Your happy zone, because of the business
experience you have had, what you see every day, your natural talents,
etc. is going to be different than mine. I am sure, moreover that you
can hit balls better in my happy zone than I can in yours just because
they are fatter pitches in general.
Lets talk more about this when we get together. Aas a beginner I
always feel that when i send off any e-mail, it is going to vanish into the
ether and i would hate to have that happen with everything I know.
GO HUSKERS--warren husky m: Jeff Raikes <jeffr@MICROSOFT.com>
To: Waren Buffett, Berkshire <warreneb@ix.netcom.com>
Subject: Go Huskers!
Date: Sunday, August 17, 1997 9:37 PM
Warren, I apologize in advance for this being a long note. I do hope you
find it interesting, and be certain I don’t expect a long reply {or any
reply at all for that matter). Perhaps sometime we’ll get a few minutes
where I can get your reaction to the thoughts on business below.
Go Huskers!
We’re looking forward to seeing you in a few weeks for the Husker game.
Please let me know if there is anything I can do |o make your stay in
Washington more enjoyable (and a little more Husker-oriented!), and I
will also check with BillG on the plans and how I might help.
I’m sad to say I’m very pessimistic about our prospects. You’ve probably
noted that Washington is very highly ranked this year. They have Huard,
arguably one of the top 2or 3 pro-style quarterbacks in the country -
and only a sophomore. And they have an outstanding defense. in the
meantime, the Huskers are replacing eight starters on defense, " and the
spring game showed that Frost still can’t throw the ball well enough.
Without a balanced attack on offense, we’ll have difficulty against
their speed. And Huard has the potential to pick apart our secondary -
we’ll need an outstanding plan on pass rush, equivalent to the
"Philadelphia Blitz" employed at the Nebraska vs. Florida Fiesta Bowl
championship game.
I hope you’re hearing better news from fall practice. People here know
I’m a huge Husker fan - I can’t tell you how painful it would be for me
to go through two more losses to the Huskies.
The Making of An American Capitalist...
Tricia and I took the kids to Disney Wodd, followed by a short vacation
to Nantucket and Cuttyhunk (a small island off Martha’s Vineyard). I
spent part of the vacation reading Lowenstein’s book (The Making of an
American Capitalist) - and really enjoyed it! On the way from Cuttyhunk
to Boston/Logan airport, we drove down Cove Road in New Bedford trying
to find the Berkshire-Hathaway mill. While I saw a few old mills, I’m
not really sure which might have been the one - I was looking for the
clock tower. Or perhaps it has been torn down.
The book got me thinking about your golf tournament, the after-dinner
"Talk with Warren", and the inevitable question - why don’t you invest
in Microsoft or high technology? The Lowenstein book provided some
stimulus to ponder the question, and I thought it would be fun to share
some thoughts with you on the subject. But I should emphasize my intent
in doing so is not to try to change your viewpoint (though I ho.pe it
doesn’t reinforce your viewS). I just view this as a fun discussion or
intellectual exercise. While many people would see our business as
complicated or hard to understand, I am absolutely convinced an astute
investor can learn our business in only 3 to 4 hours (and probably less
than two hours if BilIG explained it!).
In some respects I see the business characteristics of Coca Cola or
See’s Candy as being very similar to Microsoft. I think you would love
the simplicity of the operating system business. E.g. in FY96 there were
50 million PC’s sold in the world, and about 80% of them were licensed
for a Microsoft operating system. Although I would never write down the
analogy of a "toll bridge", people outside our company might describe
this business in that way. Those 40 million licenses averaged about $45
per, for a total of about $1.8B in revenue. By the way, the remaining
10M PC’s were largely running Microsoft operating systems - we just
didn’t get paid for them. This problem - piracy - if reduced, is one of
the key upsides to our business.
In FY2000, there will be about IOOM PC’s sold. We think we can reduce
piracy to 10% and license 90% or 90M of the PC’s. But we also have
"pricing discretion" - I think I heard this term used in conjunction
with your pricing decisions on See’s Candy. We will be transitioning the
world to a new version of our operating system, Windows NT. Today, we
get more than $100 per system for NT, but only on a small percentage of
the PC’s. But NT will be on closer to 70% of the PC’s sold in FY2000. We
can achieve average license revenue of $80. So 90M licenses at $80 per
license totals about $7.2B, up from just under $2B in 3 to 4 years. And
since there are effectively no COGs and a WW sales force of only 100-150
people this is a 90%+ margin business. There is an R&D charge to the
business, but I’m sure the profits are probably as good as the syrup
business!
There is actually upside in the number of PC’s sold. Similar to your
analysis of Coca Cola, the penetration of PC’s in international markets
leaves a lot of room for growth. In the US, the number of PC’s per 1000
people is around 400 or so, but the number drops off rapidly to t 00 or
less in most countries, even in some of the European countries.
(Unfortunately, I’m not in Seattle now so I don’t have these numbers at
my fingertips, but Steve Ballmer can recite them from memory.)
The business described above is what we call the OEM (Original Equipment
Manufacturer) business, meaning our revenue comes from the manufacturers
of the PC’s. The majority of the rest of the business is called the
"finished goods" business- it consists of businesses or individuals
buying office productivity software, educational or entertainment
software, etc. Again the structure is very simple. A PC is just a razor
that needs blades, and we measure our revenue on the basis of $ per PC.
In FY96, heady 50M PC’s were purchased and Microsoft averaged about $140
in software revenue per PC or $7B. This amount is in addition to the OEM
royalty business I described above. (Steve Ballmer can recite the number
of PCs and $ per PC to you off the top of his head
for just about any country in the wodd; BilIG can probably do the same
though he doesn’t spend as much time on that as Steve.) So in some sense
that is it. There are a certain number of PC’s that get sold, a growing
amount of Microsoft software per PC, the power to use the brand to sell
even more software, some pricing discretion, international market
growth, and the opportunity to grow revenue by further reduction in
piracy. Obviously I’m not going through a, II the. details we’d discuss
in a couple hour session, but that is me near~ of the business. Of
course there is the R&D invested to build the software, but that is
similar to Disney continuing to produce new content, or Nebraska
Furniture Mart continuing to keep their format fresh, and an Investment
that BillG manages very closely.
Even some of the new "media" businesses are really not that new or
different. Take our WebTV acquisition or the Comcast deal. I see
articles covering those investments and describing Microsol~ as becoming
media company. The real goal is to figure out a way to get an "operating
system" royalty per TV. 10’s of millions of TV's per year at $10-£20 per
TV is a nice little "operating system" business.
There is a tremendous strategic synergy between the "finished goods
business" and the OEM operating system business. E.g. we have about 90%
share of office productivity software with Microsoft Office, and that is
a great business (about $5B, also 85%+operating margin). But also
important is the fact that this software is heavily valued by the actual
users (operating systems are a bit more invisible to the user), and they
resist shifting brands, if we own the key "franchises" built on top of
the operating system, we dramatically widen the "moat" that protects the
operating system business. I.e. if I owned the most successful daily
newspaper in Buffalo, I wouldn’t want to leave it to my competitor to
own the Sunday edition.
Let’s build on this analogy and the strategic synergy between the
operating system and the software that runs on it. It helps explain the
investments we are making in Pete Higgins business (Interactive Media,
like MSN, MSNBC, Expedia, Sidewalk, etc.). Again, some newspaper and
magazine articles would say that Microsoft is trying to become a media
company. But I prefer to view it as investing in the potential "user
franchises" that will help protect our operating systems, businesses the
future. We hope to make a lot of money off these franchises, even more
important is that they should protect our Windows royalty per PC, and
hopefully our royalty per TV. And success, in those businesses will help
increase the opportunity for future pricing discretion.
So I really don’t see our business as being significantly more difficult
to understand than the other great businesses you’ve invested in. But
there is one potential difference that worries me, and it is a key part
of the reason I spent the time to share these thoughts with you. The
difference I worry about is the "width of the moat." With Coca Cola, you
can feel pretty confident that there won’t be a fast shift in user
preferences away from drinking sodas, and in particular Coke. In
technology, we may more frequently see "paradigm shifts" where old
leaders are displaced by new. Graphical user interface replaces
character user interface, the Internet explodes, etc.
In the absence of a paradigm shift in technology, market shares seldom
change by more than a few points. With a paradigm shift, the shares can
rapidly change by dozens of points. I spent my first ten years at
Microsoft building Microsoft Office. We were way behind in share most of
that time (less than 10%), but the shift to graphical user interface was
the paradigm shift that allowed us to displace the old leaders (Lotus
1-2-3 and WordPerfect) and now be at 90% share. Of course key to this
shift in share, was their failure Io identity the computing paradigm
shift and properly invest in it. They were the leaders and they could
have chosen to cannibalize themselves. But they didn’t act fast enough
and were scared that investing in the new paradigm would open the door
for us - ironically it was their slow pace that opened the door.
I remember one of our very first conversations in 1991. You asked me my
view on what happened to IBM. I don’t remember exactly what I said. I
think their addiction to the power they had in the previous generations
of computing, really blindsided them from the paradigm shift of the PC
and client-server computing.
In technology, the moats may be narrower. It is amazing how fast the
Internet exploded. Or how quickly Java gained notoriety. We have some
great moats, but even so, 18 months ago analyst were questioning whether
we could move quickly enough. (Obviously, that turned out to be a great
time to buy Microsoft!)
I am very confident about our business for the next 5 to 10 years. But I
will admit it is easier to be confident about Coke’s business for the
next 10 years. In short, I’ve long had this sneaking suspicion that it
is not that you don’t understand this business. (In fact, BilIG has
probably already explained all of the above to you and I apologize for
boring you with this, but it was fun and good for me to write it down.)
My theory is that you don’t invest in technology or Microsoft because
you see the moats as narrower; too much risk and the potential for a
fast paradigm shift that would too quickly undermine your equity position.
Since Microsoft is the business I understand (i.e. i have a narrow
circle of competence!) and I subscribe to your views on investments,
well over of my net worth is tied up there. (Thanks to BillG, I'm well
into the nine digit range.) I feel fine about having 90%+ tied up in
Microsoft. We have a safety net of tax free municipal bonds so I know
the family will be OK if something happens. And we don’t intend to leave
much to the kids, so I'm simply bulding a huge pile of chits to someday
turn back to society. I do wonder about the time period ten or twenty or
more years down the road. If at some point then the outlook for
Microsoft has changed, I hope I will have learned enough from your
approach such that I will have the ability to identify new areas of
intrinsic value and continue to grow the pile of chits at a high rate.
But for now, I’m heads down selling more software...
I’m curious as to what you think about the Lowenstein boot. I'm sure it
is difficult to have so much of your life spread across the pages, on
the other hand there are so many things for you to be proud of. It was
great to gain an understanding of Graham’s approach, and more
importantly your significant advancement of the approach. I found the
arguments of the EMT (efficient market theoreticians) just laughable.
They should spend a few days at Disney World so they can observe crowd
theory in action. Believe me, the longest lines don’t necessarily
translate into the best value! But the best part of the book was to
learn more about your values, and in particular the discipline of
character that leads to your success in investing. I wish there were a
magic formula for teaching this to our children!
This leaves me one final task for this note. I’ve done a very poor job
of adequately thanking you for all the great things you’ve don,e for me
- golf at Augusta, Seminole, the Buffett Classic, and in particular, the
opportunity to listen in on great conversations and learn from you. I
want you to know I’ve really appreciated your kindness, and if there is
ever anything I might do to reciprocate, please let me know.
Thanks. Jeff Raikes
http://edge-op.org/iowa/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011607/2000/PX02752.pdfhttp://edge-op.org/iowa/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011607/2000/PX02756_A.pdf
--
court documents in the case of Comes v. Microsoft.
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