There's a tax credit for claiming your work is R&D: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_&_Experimentation_Tax_Credit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_&_

There's a tax credit for claiming your work is R&D: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_&_Experimentation_Tax_Credit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_&_Experimentation_Tax_... This creates an incentive for companies to find ways to report their work as R&D. (Not implying that Twitter is defrauding or that their work isn't R&D, just stating why it might be useful for a company to "invest in" R&D, especially if that is work they wanted done anyway.)