Comment by mike_hearn

> Do. the. math. and. think.

OK then, where's your math?

tptacek is right, this whole discussion is silly because it revolves around what exactly "bad" means which is subjective. But if you want to really do calculations about this, you'd need to price out total expected revenue over your time preference window for each scenario. It's not at all obvious which one would win because it depends on at least these variables and probably more:

1. Over what time period you care about. "You" here means a hypothetical pharma executive who cares about his/her incentives. If symptom management makes a billion dollars repeatedly but each billion takes 200 years, and a cure makes a billion dollars once but in five years, nobody rational will want to sell symptom management.

2. Related to (1) what expected market returns are in future.

3. What price premium you can charge for a cure vs symptom management. The former is more valuable to customers.

4. How fast competitors can catch up. Imagine you find both symptom management and a cure for disease X. You keep the cure a secret and bring the subscription to market (for a price much less than what a cure would command). Six months later a competitor releases a cure, simultaneously wiping out your market and capturing all the immediate revenue. That would have been a bad move.