3 ms·
When I read about the immense amount of money that has reportedly gone into research at companies like Microsoft, billions of dollars, and seen very little ever
by swartkrans 12y ago
When I read about the immense amount of money that has reportedly gone into research at companies like Microsoft, billions of dollars, and seen very little ever come of it, I can't help but think maybe they would have been better of just making it a venture capital fund. I don't think R&D departments have the incentive entrepreneurs have in actually making research useful. Google X stands out as different, and I think that's because Google seems to be using it for marketing as much as research. We've yet to see any game changers come out of there, unless you think Google Glass was a success. The self-driving automobiles are interesting and will probably lead to something, and the air drones too. It's probably not all a wash.
- reboog711 12y agoThe conspiracy theory I heard is that MS is playing a long game to go private. Whenever their stock starts to go up; they pump a lot into R&D which makes them less attractive to investors stabilizing or lowering their stock price while not devaluing the company. I don't know enough about stock manipulating to evaluate these statements, but I found them interesting when first told to me.
- tiffanyh 12y agoThe dollar figures for "R&D" are really deceiving. Don't forget the "D" stand for development. For a company the size of Microsoft, who has 130k employees, it's not unrealistic to imagine 40k employees are developers and/or product management. At an average fully loaded cost of $150k per developer x 40k developers = $6 Billion. So all the cost to just maintain their EXISTING product set, in this illustration, might be $6B ... none of which is "research"