

Short Term Thinking vs Long Term Thinking - codeme
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2013/03/short-term-thinking-vs-long-term-thinking.html

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cryptoz
I've spent a lot of time recently wondering about short-term vs long-term
thinking. In politics, I've heard people say that the important decisions are
all "long-term", which they define as 2-3 years (Canada). In technology and
science, "long-term" seems to also mean 2-3 years for so many people (the
author of this article excluded, obviously). The Apple/Samsung/Google blog
posts that dominate tech media almost all reek of this thinking.

It's very bizarre. In these domains, why is the prevailing thinking not that
"short-term" = 2-3 years, and "long-term" = 20-30-500 years? I think the world
would be a significantly better place is more people thought about what the
world will look like, and how their actions will affect it, 50 years out.

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rmk2
Neither politics nor economics enable long-term thinking structurally.

"Long-term" is useless in economics since everything depends on your next
earning call(s). If your figures are bad, you will probably let go, and there
is no way to ensure continuity, since there can be no assurance that your
successor(s) won't "pivot", as it is so nicely described here.

"Long-term" is equally useless in politics, were the next election date
replaces your next earning call. You can _promise_ all sorts of things that
are supposed to happen after the next election, however, there is no way to
ensure continuity. Your political successor(s) _might_ continue, or they might
not, instead reversing your policies and decisions. (edit: A good example is
the UK's David Cameron right now, who _promises_ a EU-referendum _once_ he
gets re-elected (and really, it should be _if_ ). Will he be elected? We will
have to wait and see.)

Both our political and economic systems discourage long-term planning and
thinking by focusing on short-sighted goals in the interest of present
interests (be they stockholders' interests or politician's interests). Both
systems are geared towards cementing one's own position of power (whether
through money or policymaking), and long-term thinking is not particularly
useful for that, simply because the further into the future the projected
plans reach, the more uncertain they become.

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gfodor
I'm pretty sure AAPL's selloff has less to do with long term thinking and more
with retail investors/hedgies who rode the wave seeing the stock go down and
decide the party's over, it's just time to get out and take profits. Rinse,
repeat. AAPL's current valuation is absurdly pessimistic of the company's
future prospects.

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swalsh
I sold my apple stock when I heard about the iPad mini. To me its an
indication that there's no more radical innovation at Apple. They're going to
try to ride on their past successes. I'm sure some new things will come out in
the next few years, and i'm sure they'll make a billion dollars doing it, but
they won't have that "Steve jobs" touch that made people want to wait outside
in cold weather for days in advance to buy them.

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importednoob
How the hell did this make it to the front-page of HackerNews?

TLDR; (Last paragraph of the article) "So my feeling is that Google is playing
the long game in mobile while Apple is missing the cloud piece and Samsung is
just a hardware player at this point. And the stock market understands that."

Really...

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sac2171
What part of that seems crazy to you? It seems pretty clear, concise and true
to me...

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ewbuoi
It all seemed reasonable enough to me, except for the fact that after talking
about long-term thinking so much he posted a graph of a 24 month period, and
for more than half of that Google and Apple were very close in value,
contradicting what he said.

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fredwilson
look at the last six months of the chart

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mark_l_watson
re: "You can change handsets pretty easily when all your data is in the
cloud."

True enough. I was up and running in minutes when I upgraded an old Droid to a
Samsung S III. I just had to install the couple of apps I use and logon to my
Google account, then wait a few minutes. Everything was there.

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snowwrestler
This reads to me like the classic market share pitch--if you get a big enough
user group, you're bound to get rich someday. A lot of Internet companies have
thought this way in the past. Only a few of them have actually made it happen.

Google has made a ton of money from search, but never made much money from
maps or Gmail on the desktop, despite massive market share. I don't see any
specifics that explain why it will be different on mobile.

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ttrreeww
America is short term thinking, China is long term thinking.

