You can tell a lot about a company by how they report their results:
Some companies focus on the actual values (size):
“We made a net profit of $15 million.”
Some companies focus on the first derivative (growth):
“Revenues increased by 9%.”
Some companies focus on the second derivative (acceleration):
“We added 100,000 new customers in the last year, 70,000 of these in the last two months.”
There is a time and a place for each. But you can often take your pick, depending on the spin you want.
For example … Skype
This graph from GigaOm showing quarterly revenues:
http://gigaom.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/skyperevenues.gif
The headline in this case was: “Skype’s growth starts to slow” (acceleration, or in this case deceleration).
It could just have easily been “Skype reports record revenue of $145m” (size) or “Skype increases revenue by 26% compared to the same period last year” (growth).
To get the full picture you probably want to know all three.
Some smart observations Rowan. It is always interesting to note how organisations avoid reporting profit, which apart form having a comfortable cash-flow, is the most important number.