By this reasoning, everyone would shirk at work. If you think incentives only act over short time horizons, I don't know how you explain an enormous amount of human behavior.
The market didn't even understand it. Most of the people trading equities, especially around earnings announcements, don't know what a data warehouse is or what matters in that market. All they saw was "miss".
I didn't say the CEO was wrong or that long-term thinking is bad! I said the actual incentives are still misaligned. (I mean, a lot of people do shirk at work, and it even works out well for them.)
I think you have a weird and probably not useful definition of "actual" if "monthly revenue" is not actual but "projected monthly revenue two years from now" is actual. (Or maybe I've just lived in Germany too long.)
You are right, I've used the word "actual" incorrectly. What I should have said was "net". Ie, both short term and long term revenue incentivize behavior and in this case the net result was increasing performance, ie long term incentive > short term incentive.
The market didn't even understand it. Most of the people trading equities, especially around earnings announcements, don't know what a data warehouse is or what matters in that market. All they saw was "miss".