As a former professional investor quarterly is fine. i want mgmt focused on running the business, not reporting to investors. Anyone who wants more frequent data so they can trade the stock can hit the road as far as I care.
Do you think that having some data reported automatically in realtime could minimize surprises such as what we see here? Perhaps then the quarterly reports could be more focused on describing the longterm strategy and market landscape?
Go read Buffetts annual shareholder letters, they are free on the internet going back 40 years. He repeatedly makes the key point that your investments need to have some enduring competitive advantage, if they do you don't need constant upgrades, if they don't sell. Enduring competitive advantages don't disappear over night, if they degrade they do it slowly over many years.
I think that with new companies, like Snapchat, Instagram, or even Uber, changing strategies on a monthly basis has become somewhat of a requirement.
But in reality it's not totally true. SnapChat and (probably) Instagram have huge installed bases, but haven't yet figured out how to monetize them. They aren't businesses or investments, they have no strategy other than just pure speculation.
But Uber provides a service connecting riders with drivers that costs pennies per ride to deliver and earns dollars per ride in revenues. If you know how much Uber is spending to build out markets, and on unneeded distractions like UberEats and self driving cars, you can estimate the value of their core business. Uber's strategy has never changed, they've just obfuscated it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_10-Q
Edit: This is only relevant to publicly traded companies.
In working with public company CFO's, I would guess 50% of the time & effort that goes into quarterly reporting is making sure everything came out of the SAP system correctly.