[dsr_]

Revenue is frequently gamed, anyway. If you tell a large sales department that revenue must be maximized this year: all bonuses depend on total contract value, then they will happily destroy the profitability of every new contract. Selling 2 million widgets for the price that competitors charge for 500,000 widgets is easy.

During the first Internet boom, when telephone modems and $20/month all-you-can-eat ISPs were the hot thing, Lucent made the best point-of-presence device, the Ascend Max: very nearly everything you needed to get access for a town in one box. Lucent discovered that new ISPs had little startup cash but generated strong monthly recurring revenue, so Lucent financed the Max for the ISPs, with the highly in-demand Max itself as the collateral. After all, if an ISP collapsed, the used Max could be sold again at nearly full price.

Lucent didn't count on the entire ISP market consolidating.