It has not, historically, been in the nature of companies to think or act in the long term. People inside companies have incentives to bring short term profits, while long term profits benefits only the company as a whole, not any individual internal actor who may be positioned to make them happen. Therefore, they don’t happen, and large organizations basically always act only in the short term.
This isn’t true. There are many companies that make long term decisions at the expense of short term value. The reason it doesn’t feel that way is because those are the kinds of moves and companies that tend to fly under the radar, while short term blockbuster moves get trotted out as examples more often because the consequences, good or bad, tend to be more of a spectacle.
I don't think this is quite true. Companies which are privately owned, or run by their founders tend to have long term interests. People get tied up in the idea of their 'legacy', or move beyond the ideals of mere profit and want to affect change in the world and build a world more to their liking.
It's things like that which motivated Henry Ford to pay his workers are more fair wage than his competitors.
Google's founders still control either the majority or a large plurality of the voting stock, so they can have the company align with long-term profit motives, and sustainable existence.
Yeah, that's common knowledge but like most such knowledge it may contain a nugget of truth (yes, there are certain structures that reward shorttermism), it just doesn't stand up to scrutiny as a general framework. In studying practically all companies that has become successful at scale and sustained both success and scale over a period of time, you can find plenty of evidence of long term thinking.
Google in particular has shown itself to be perfectly capable of setting and following a long term strategy.
In the case of both Google and Facebook, the founders still have more than 50% of the voting rights (not ownership) and I don't believe that they are necessarily motivated by making another billion. I think they are interested in the long term success of their company.
