Short Term Thinking vs Long Term Thinking • Hacker News Board

Re: Short Term Thinking vs Long Term Thinking

#11

Post by fredwilson » Mon, Mar 18, 2013, 8:55 PM UTC

ewbuoi wrote: post #7

sac2171 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

look at the last six months of the chart

Re: Short Term Thinking vs Long Term Thinking

#12

Post by swalsh » Mon, Mar 18, 2013, 9:49 PM UTC

gfodor wrote: post #10

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.

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.

Re: Short Term Thinking vs Long Term Thinking

#13

Post by snowwrestler » Mon, Mar 18, 2013, 10:13 PM UTC

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.

Re: Short Term Thinking vs Long Term Thinking

#14

Post by snowwrestler » Mon, Mar 18, 2013, 10:25 PM UTC

cryptoz wrote: post #2

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 r…

Long-term thinking is actually a big part of politics in the United States. Quite a few fights revolve around it.

Debt and entitlement fights are about how policy decisions made today will affect the solvency of programs like Medicare or Social Security decades from now.

Intellectual property fights are about whether making IP less lucrative will affect the rate of innovation over the long term--again, looking at decade time scales.

Tax fights are about the long-term impact on economic growth. No one thinks taxing the rich a few more percentage points will kill all the businesses overnight. The fear is that over time, it will reduce the pool of available capital to fund "big bet, big risk" investments.

Even fights over social issues like gay marriage are about the long-term moral health of our society.

A lot of these are expressed as short-term fights over self-imposed deadlines like the fiscal cliff, the debt limit, or the continuing resolution. But the reason the fights are so vicious is because both parties believe they are the ones truly thinking long-term.