Why there's nothing special about the business of software

And, I pseudo-randomly sampled companies that interested me.

Walmart Revenue: $378 B Profit: $12 B Employees: 2055 K Revenue per employee: $183 K Profit per employee: $5 K

Exxon Revenue: $372 B Profit: $40 B Employees: 107 K Revenue per employee: $3476 K Profit per employee: $373 K

ING Group Revenue: $201 B Profit: $12 B Employees: 120 K Revenue per employee: $1675 K Profit per employee: $100 K

GM Revenue: $182 B Profit: $-38 B Employees: 266 K Revenue per employee: $684 K Profit per employee: $-143 K

Ford Revenue: $172 B Profit: $-2 B Employees: 246 K Revenue per employee: $699 K Profit per employee: $-9 K

Citigroup Revenue: $159 B Profit: $3 B Employees: 380 K Revenue per employee: $418 K Profit per employee: $7 K

At&T Revenue: $118 B Profit: $11 B Employees: 309 K Revenue per employee: $381 K Profit per employee: $35 K

Samsung Revenue: $106 B Profit: $7.9 B Employees: 144 K Revenue per employee: $736 K Profit per employee: $55 K

IBM Revenue: $98 B Profit: $10 B Employees: 386 K Revenue per employee: $253 K Profit per employee: $25 K

Nestle Revenue: $89 B Profit: $8 B Employees: 276 K Revenue per employee: $322 K Profit per employee: $28 K

Cardinal Health Revenue: $88 B Profit: $1.9 B Employees: 43 K Revenue per employee: $2046 K Profit per employee: $44 K

Sony Revenue: $77 B Profit: $3.2 B Employees: 180 K Revenue per employee: $427 K Profit per employee: $18 K

Costco Revenue: $64 B Profit: $1 B Employees: 98.5 K Revenue per employee: $650 K Profit per employee: $10 K

Microsoft Revenue: $51 B Profit: $14 B Employees: 79 K Revenue per employee: $645 K Profit per employee: $177 K

Oracle Revenue: $17.9 B Profit: $4 B Employees: 64.6 K Revenue per employee: $277 K Profit per employee: $62 K

Cisco Revenue: $34.9 B Profit: $7.3 B Employees: 61 K Revenue per employee: $572 K Profit per employee: $120 K

Coca Cola Revenue: $28.8 B Profit: $5.9 B Employees: 90 K Revenue per employee: $320 K Profit per employee: $66 K

TIAA-CREF Revenue: $27.5 B Profit: $1.4 B Employees: 7.5 K Revenue per employee: $3667 K Profit per employee: $187 K

Apple Revenue: $24 B Profit: $3.4 B Employees: 22.6 K Revenue per employee: $1062 K Profit per employee: $150 K

Even more interesting: salary per employee (not only for its meaning to employees but to the local economy.

If you search for software companies that do try to maximize their per-employee profit, you find companies like 37Signals and id software, which I imagine are at least an order of magnitude above any other organization that's been mentioned. They're what make the business of software special, not Microsoft and Google.

Total revenue can be useful. Total Profit can be useful. Profit per employee can be useful. Loss per employee is useful.

Revenue per employee is half the story. This is how you run your business into the ground - Believing half stories.

Perhaps the author conflates revenue and profit?

Edit: in fact, the author actually notes this. Which makes the whole exercise stupid: If you don't have the data you need, you don't have the data you need and using the maximum value instead is useless. As should have been trivially obvious at the time the author wrote the blog post by examining one of his or her own examples.