This is silly in the sense that it really doesn't consider companies who have attempted to scale horizontally in attempts to capture different markets than their core interest.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say Microsoft, absolutely could fire everyone not related to developing/selling/supporting Windows, still make 5 billion dollars a quarter from software sales, and easily be at the top of this list.
Likewise, Google's pure search and adwords team is probably much more 'efficient' at generating revenue than say the Android team, but you get diminishing returns at a certain point with your core product line. The smart thing for a company to do is to grow the company's revenue (and hopefully profit) when the time is right into other, less high margin sectors.
CraigsList is at the top because they do one thing very well. In five years, if they were a public company, their shareholders wouldn't be too happy if they kept their #1 efficiency spot but didn't continue their growth.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say Microsoft, absolutely could fire everyone not related to developing/selling/supporting Windows, still make 5 billion dollars a quarter from software sales, and easily be at the top of this list.
Likewise, Google's pure search and adwords team is probably much more 'efficient' at generating revenue than say the Android team, but you get diminishing returns at a certain point with your core product line. The smart thing for a company to do is to grow the company's revenue (and hopefully profit) when the time is right into other, less high margin sectors.
CraigsList is at the top because they do one thing very well. In five years, if they were a public company, their shareholders wouldn't be too happy if they kept their #1 efficiency spot but didn't continue their growth.