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Amazed by the R&D expense of $380.3M especially because I'm not aware of substantive innovations that they're bringing to market. How has / will that investmen
by jseip 9y ago
Amazed by the R&D expense of $380.3M especially because I'm not aware of substantive innovations that they're bringing to market. How has / will that investment translate into new technology or a technically superior product?
- xoob 9y agoThey also work on stuff like [Dropbox Paper](https://www.dropbox.com/paper https://www.dropbox.com/paper), a markdown capable minimalist Google Docs alternative.
- uniformlyrandom 9y agoYou underestimate the amount of engineering effort required to simply run a fast-growing highload service.
- alex_young 9y agoR&D is probably almost all going to be salaries for engineering talent. It takes a lot of people to run your own end to end solution for 500m users. Remember, they are doing everything from software development to running data centers.
- adadad3442 9y agoThat also suprised me- I know that they spend a great deal on optimizations to reduce backend cost, improve uptime / reliability, etc., but I don't see much on the customer side myself...
- codezero 9y agoI’m not 100% sure but I believe this is also called R&D because it had different financial/accounting meaning which affects how spend/revenue are reported. They can be considered expenses that are reported on taxes, and also since there is risk of no or poor ROI knowing the R&D component of the budget helps adjust for risk in modeling future revenue and expenses.