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"three times the revenue of Microsoft and Intel combined" I would think profits are a more reasonable metric for the overall comparison. Amazon alone has a hu
by dmarlow 9y ago
"three times the revenue of Microsoft and Intel combined"
I would think profits are a more reasonable metric for the overall comparison.
Amazon alone has a huge disparity between revenue and profits.
- nostrademons 9y agoDepends what you're measuring. Shareholders (ultimately) care about profits, but if you're a pundit trying to predict the impact of technology on human populations (as Ben Evans ultimately is, though he works for a shareholder), revenues is a more relevant metric. It shows "how many dollars flow through a company", rather than "how many dollars does the company get to keep"; the former is a metric for how much impact the company has, while the latter is a metric for how efficiently it generates that impact.
- maneesh 9y agoExactly. To dive one more dimension in, if a company is extremely profitable, that is typically a sign that the company doesn't know how to deploy their capital towards growth. High profits are often a sign of stagnation in a corporation.
- adventured 9y agoNot to mention it's absurd to include Amazon's $100 billion in retail business in the calculation. How do Dell and HP (among others) get left out of Wintel? As others have noted, it's an article stacked to fake a point. And why are they comparing a Microsoft-Intel partnership against GAFA, which is the exact opposite of a partnership. It should be some combination of: Microsoft, Oracle, Intel, Sun Microsystems, Apple, HP, Dell from the year 2000.
- Rexxar 9y agoIMHO, "Value added" is the best (but far from perfect) way to compare the real size/power of different companies in different markets.