[emathias]

Originally Posted by 10023

As an aside, revenue is a pretty stupid way to rank the importance of companies. Retail businesses have enormous top-line revenue but single-digit margins, because they’re really just passing through inventory, whereas software companies with 70-80% margins are much more valuable with much lower revenues. The nature of the business also affects the quality of the jobs (that software company has a lot more highly-paid employees than the retailer). But they do it because revenue is a fairly easily obtainable metric even for private companies, whereas ranking them on market value (or profits, or cash flow) would only be possible with a good degree of certainty for public companies.

That is all true, although revenue also reflects a company's ability to influence the economy through how it touches money flow. Even if a retailer doesn't keep very much of its revenue, it directs where that pass-through goes and, in doing so, exerts power that way. That's a type of a power a high-net software company doesn't have (a few do, but most don't).