Comment by DanielHB
3 days ago
It amazes me how much these companies make actually gets spent on R&D, you see the funnel charts on reddit and I am like what the hell. Microsoft only spends ~6bn USD on R&D with a total 48bn of revenue and 15bn in profits?
What the hell is going on, they should be able to keep an army of PhDs doing pointless research even if only one paper in 10 years comes to a profitable product. But instead they are cutting down workforce like there is no tomorrow...
(I know, I know, market dynamics, value extraction, stock market returns)
R and D in the financial statements I've seen basically covers the entire product, engineering etc org. Lots and lots of people, but not what regular people consider RnD.
I know, R&D is like that in every company. It is mostly "development" not research.
What I am pointing out is that they could be doing a shit ton of research, what happened to big companies sponsoring fringe research? That used to be a thing, at Microsoft even.
aka "Big D, little r"
well, look at Meta... they're spending Billions with a capital B on stuff and they get slaughtered every earnings call because it hasn't paid off yet. if Zuckerberg wasn't the majority share holder it probably wouldn't be sustainable.