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Comment by tootie | Hacker News Reader

It's not just that, it's also notoriety and reputation. No one is going to that site to learn what BH is and what it has to offer. They don't care about any SEO beyond people searching "Berkshire Hathaway". They're not a B2C brand. They are not converting sales. They are not creating Brand Halo. It's basically just their federally-mandated SEC filings.

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isn't that the point the author is making? they're suggesting that a website that most average internet folks would say is terrible/ugly/bad/etc is actually nearly perfect when looking through the lens of "who does this website serve".

it feels a bit naive to shrug this off as "elite wealthy people getting their ego boosted". where are the articles praising Jeff Bezos' "expeditions" website[0], or Bill Gates' personal blog[1]?

[0] https://www.bezosexpeditions.com/

[1] https://www.gatesnotes.com/

It's hardly a masterclass though, and it wasn't designed that way because Warren Buffet carefully thought about it and decided this was the best way to do it. He just decided to put effectively 0 effort into the website and ended up with a basic HTML file that perhaps wasn't all that out of place in 1990.

Perhaps that is the masterclass: not wasting time and effort where it isn’t needed. I have seen that pattern in successful people, focusing on the right things and knowing what to ignore.

Disclaimer: I’m a yak shaver, I’ll waste immense time on “perfecting“ something irrelevant.

Yes —- for instance, it’s not very mobile friendly.

But check out the page's source. The site isn't so much a "master class in design" as it is a page that was made in the 90's and has never been updated. Back then this was how almost every webpage looked. It's still using tables for layout. Based on the MSHTML generator tag, it was most likely made in MS FrontPage.

"The site isn't so much a "master class in design" as it is a page that was made in the 90's and has never been updated"

Have you looked at sec.gov?

The part of the site I interact with most often, edgar (https://www.sec.gov/edgar.shtml), does not look like it was made in the 90s at all. And the other parts of government services I interact with (SBIR stuff, like SAM registration and all), are worse, but even they are rolling out new versions of things (e.g. fastlane) that are better.

And looking at sec.gov right now looks nothing like a 90s website. It has clean graphics, its responsive, etc. Not exactly sure how it looks like it hasn't been updated from the 90s.

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