I think the accountant would retort that it's way better to get $125 of profit from $500 of revenue than from $1000 of revenue, overall. In the former case, you have a lot of padding for conditions to change, and in the latter case you don't.

And, if there's some outside dealer that can make a profit taking their $500 cut, but you need to pay all of the $500 out-- it seems like your sales function is less efficient-- less efficient than the rest of Autodesk and less efficient than the outside dealer.

Margins aren't everything. Absent outside judgment, I think I'd rather make, say, $175 profit from $1k of revenue than $125 from $500. But I wouldn’t trade $125 on $500 for $126 on $1,000.

And, of course, there's always the strategic concerns. Control of accounts, opportunities to upsell or cross-sell, etc, etc. Financial reporting can't tell the whole story, because you can't boil down the whole story of a company to a few numbers. It's the triumph of GAAP that it's a pretty dang good start to understanding most companies.