[jrbapna]

But the term bubble, at least when used by the media, also seems to have a connotation of bursting in the near future. If someone told me tech was in a bubble, but the pop wouldn't be for another century, I would not define it as a bubble. Even if the future pop was enormous.

[vectorpush]

What if the century long bubble concluded with a pop that resulted in total economic collapse? I'm not suggesting that is likely, just that the defining characteristic of a bubble seems to be the magnitude of the fallout after the pop, not the span of time leading up to the pop.

[jrbapna]

Investors, especially those of public companies, are known to be short sighted. Typical investors would never call it a "bubble" if they felt the pop wasn't for another decade, let alone a century.

Perhaps both the magnitude and the time leading up to it are of equal importance.

[smt88]

It's probably better to think of bubbles as the accumulation of unsustainable behavior.

Obviously we aren't able to predict a few months into the future, let alone a hundred years, so it's hard to definitively say whether current behavior is sustainable for a hundred years or not.

It's much more reasonable/believable to say that current behavior is unsustainable for 1, 5, or 10 years.