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RayW
Premium
join:2001-09-01
Layton, UT
clubs:
 ·XMission
| Re: Is it really short sighted investors? said by Titus Pullo  :or do these investors know something about future economic conditions that average Joe doesn't? No, it is the American way. Double digit returns today or else get rid of the executives. And if it means laying off half the working force to get the double digits, then do it. Never mind that the company is forecast to show TRIPLE DIGIT in 5 years, we want ours today, this minute.
This is the real reason China is winning. They do not care if they are getting a couple of percent today, it is still profit. They are building towards having control in 15-20 years and THAT is where they will rake in the returns. Ummm... Bill Gates sort of did the same thing in the DOS and early Windoze days, he wrote restrictive licenses, and then did not enforce them until today when Microsoft pretty much controls the PC software market.
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I am not lost, I find myself every time. | |
|  deepblackmag
join:2004-12-27
00000
| Re: Is it really short sighted investors? Yes, today. because with the way investors and execs are running companys the economy wont be there in a decade. Short sighted isnt a powerful enough term to describe their stupid small minded anti-social behavior. In business school people are taught that the first last and only responsability is the bottom line. net rev has become the embodyment of all that is wrong with the american economy. not that many other countries are doing better these days, after being infected with the now ubiquitous viewpoint. The first responsability of any business should not be to its shareholders, executives, or employees, but to the society that ALLOWS it to exist and operate, and that means making choices that are not the best for the highly-flawed business meteric of choice (bottom line)
If we dont start investing in the future, not next month or year, but the long term future, decades and centurys, we simply wont have one. Look at many long standing japanese businesses. some have business plans set for 75 years in the future. No that doesnt mean they are inflexible, as any plan will be changed continuously, but merely that they have some foresight to invision their company in a long off time generations away.
The right choice may not always be the MOST profitable choice. Verizon might have made more money in the short term doing ADSL2+ and hybrid infastructure FTTN etc. but they made the more difficult right choice for the future of telecom infastructure in this country and chose to lay fiber. The small stupid shareholders will no doubt be furious that their returns will be smaller, however the country as a whole will be stronger, and more money will be made later.
Most business people are stupid greedy scoundrels. Well, maybe not, but certainly the ones i have met. Single mindedness toward a few poorly chosen numbers deciding the fate of thousands of familys livelyhoods. Complete lack of understanding of long term impact of current actions. They will never change until they are forced to change, and unfortunately for the rest of us, that will mean a complete breakdown of the existing economic mismanagement we enjoy today. A great man once told me that american business somehow succeeded in spite of itself. I disagree. I think american business is failing and just doesnt know it yet. Im just worried that nobody will see it until we crash into the ground from our meteoric fall from the top. Oh well. flame away. =P | |
| | PDXPLT
join:2003-12-04
Banks, OR
| Analysts == salesmen for brokerage houses Remember one thing: "analysts" get paid by their employers to do one thing: generate churn (and thus, commissions). Encouraging short-term trading; thrashing about based on whatever "news" available, is the reason they exist. So personally I don't give what they say much credance.
That said, Verizon does have an issue that they are making a large investion in FIOS, primarily to give it a capability Comcast, et al, already has. That is, to sell TV. This means they need to compete on price; not the greatest business to be in. Everybody on this site is ga-ga over FIOS as a provider of high-speed internet access, but selling commodity bandwidth isn't the greatest of business. To Verizon FIOS == a method to sell high-margin TV services.
Maybe they don't have a choice, since the MSO's are busy stealing their high-margin phone business. But that doesn't mean FIOS is a great business to be in. | |
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