alt Hacker NewsIt's not that he missed out on it, both Buffett and munger said that they didn't really understand technology so they didn't feel a reason to go there. They felt they better understood insurance and railroads and candies and whatnot and they made Bank doing it.
I agree and I think furthermore no one has really understood technology enough to have consistently made the right moves, because tech stocks fundamentally were blazing a new trail.
Buffett invested in businesses that, relatively speaking, were already well understood, if not widely by everyone, the point being that you could look at the balances and financial statements of an insurance company and derive an investment plan that was based on basically nothing new. Google, and tech in general, were not like that.
I think now some tech stocks do look like that. Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, all have business models that are much more well understood at this point than 30 years ago.
Even though Google has been wildly successful, I do see them as riskier since they derive so much of their income from web search ads, which feels like a precarious position compared to selling office productivity suites, databases, and CRMs to enterprises (I know Google does some of this but it's not where they make the bulk of their income).