Google at some point stated they will always prioritize long term interests of their users vs. short term interests of their shareholders (paraphrasing). I think that's the key - when you focus on your users, financial success follows and stock price will reflect that.
As far as satisfying the shareholders, A and C wouldn't invest in the same company (growth vs. mature), Bs are speculators which you should almost always ignore (except when you need to throw them a bone to avoid activist situation). D/E don't really exist in the world of institutional investors, which are the investors you would have a dialog with (retail investors are generally just along for the ride).
> Google at some point stated they will always prioritize long term interests of their users vs. short term interests of their shareholders (paraphrasing)
They say that, but they don't actually do that. If they were prioritizing the long-term interests of their users, they wouldn't be giving away their core services for free and funding them with advertising revenues. That may seem better for users in the short term, but in the long term it means that only services that promise advertising revenues are available; services that lots of users like (e.g., Google Reader), but which don't generate enough advertising revenue, get shut down, no matter what the impact is on users. The best thing for the long-term interests of users is for Google to charge users directly for services; yes, figuring out how to do this for something like Google search is a hard problem, but what is Google for if not to solve hard problems that no other company is in a position to solve?
"when you focus on your users, financial success follows"
This is _extremely_ naive. Google is a good example: you could immediately find a dozen examples where everybody, including them knows that a given solution/service/feature does not serve their users' interest -- it's for money.
It's exactly the other way around, that's why free market works. You focus on financial success, and THAT is going to lead to making your users happy. There are a lot of stories where the best alternative died because of the lack of a reasonable business model; and there are almost zero examples where most successful market participant was not the one with the best _overall_ solution. (Best overall == that is chosen by most of the people. And yes, Microsoft is one of them: we all remember how crappy Win95 was, but some of us might even remember that it did things nothing else on the market was able to do.)
As far as satisfying the shareholders, A and C wouldn't invest in the same company (growth vs. mature), Bs are speculators which you should almost always ignore (except when you need to throw them a bone to avoid activist situation). D/E don't really exist in the world of institutional investors, which are the investors you would have a dialog with (retail investors are generally just along for the ride).