American corporate labs are the stuff of legend. Researchers dream of the halcyon days of Bell Labs and its eight Nobel Prize winners, who brought us the transi

American corporate labs are the stuff of legend. Researchers dream of the halcyon days of Bell Labs and its eight Nobel Prize winners, who brought us the transistor and Unix. Others reminisce about Xerox PARC, which came up with the graphical user interface that propelled the personal computer into just about every home and office. Those days are long gone... What about commodity clusters (i.e. all cloud computing), MapReduce/Hadoop, Spark, or the deep learning renaissance? Yes, I am super biased, but I think Google and Facebook have done as much to advance technology as their predecessors. But apart from that they have a point. Raw numbers matter, and even though R&D might have a fuzzy boundary with ordinary business, I think that R&D expenditure is a useful signal.