In late 2020, it was revealed that Berkshire Hathaway had an investment in newly public Snowflake, the “data warehouse as a service” company. That was unusual for a couple of reasons. First, Buffett has always avoided new issues. Like in 50 years, he hasn’t bought a new stock issue. Second, Snowflake is a tech company […]
I’ve been trying to get a handle on the growth and development of cloud in China. But the four companies that account for about 80% of infrastructure spending (Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu and Huawei) don’t really publish many cloud details in their financials and filings. Fortunately, Kingsoft Cloud has gone public as a stand-alone China cloud […]
In Part 1 and Part 2, I laid out Baidu’s core search engine and some of the complexities that have evolved in search over time. I have three strategy questions for Baidu going forward: How competitive will a stand-alone search engine be against China’s larger digital giants over time? Can Baidu create a second large […]