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Amazon R&D spending is more than that of all companies and government of France

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Re: Amazon R&D spending is more than that of all companies and government of France

#81

Like many of the comments here, I'm very curious what counts as "R&D" spend by Amazon. My guess (and happy to be corrected if I'm wrong) is that it includes a big chunk of AWS capex spend. I think it's great that Amazon invested so much into AWS, but it then also isn't surprising that the company that runs a huge portion of the Internet has large "R&D" spend.

Exactly, or to put it another way, what would big tech companies classify the bulk of their expenses as, if not R&D?

Re: Amazon R&D spending is more than that of all companies and government of France

#82
post #2

I suspect its just a tax break related policy, ive been doing the same shit at US companies (still in EU), and some European companies (in EU) and the US one were the only one asking me to file reports for hours classified as R&D, maybe european ones have no incentive to do that Id say, considering that, and considering that for these corps taxes are lava, i’d go to look at incentives on taxes about R&D filing

Been doing the same in the UK. Everything not BAU was R&D. Installed a new server package and configured it? R&D baby. Or so I was told, because you know, it’s new to the company ;) ;)

Re: Amazon R&D spending is more than that of all companies and government of France

#83
post #2

I suspect its just a tax break related policy, ive been doing the same shit at US companies (still in EU), and some European companies (in EU) and the US one were the only one asking me to file reports for hours classified as R&D, maybe european ones have no incentive to do that Id say, considering that, and considering that for these corps taxes are lava, i’d go to look at incentives on taxes about R&D filing

France has a giant research tax break that is very wildly misused by corporations who put development in it. There are even service companies with “research centers” now. They simply bill employees without a client to the state for doing “research” that mostly consists in completing tutorials on the latest trendy technology at the HQ.

Re: Amazon R&D spending is more than that of all companies and government of France

#85
post #79

It's no surprise, Amazon market cap is > 50% of the entire country of France GDP. Amazon market cap: $1.6T France GDP: $2.9T These numbers would be skewed even more if Apple ($3T) or Microsoft ($3T) were used instead. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AMZN/ https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?locat...

Feel obliged to point out this is misleading / not especially relevant: GDP is the value of the annual output of a country, while market capitalization is the (discounted) value of all future cash flows of a company. LVMH is ~0.5T market cap French company, but it’s nowhere near 1/6th of French economic output.

This is a lot like the recent “Novo Nordisk’s market cap is greater than the GDP of Denmark!” comparisons — true, but they’re not like numbers (and indeed, much of Novo Nordisk’s revenue is captured in Danish GDP).

Re: Amazon R&D spending is more than that of all companies and government of France

#86
post #85
post #79

It's no surprise, Amazon market cap is > 50% of the entire country of France GDP. Amazon market cap: $1.6T France GDP: $2.9T These numbers would be skewed even more if Apple ($3T) or Microsoft ($3T) were used instead. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AMZN/ https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?locat...

Feel obliged to point out this is misleading / not especially relevant: GDP is the value of the annual output of a country, while market capitalization is the (discounted) value of all future cash flows of a company. LVMH is ~0.5T market cap French company, but it’s nowhere near 1/6th of French economic output. This is a lot like the recent “Novo Nordisk’s market cap is greater than the GDP of Denmark!” comparisons —…

Here's another comparison:

  # of Amazon employees:          1.7M

  # of working people in France:  30M
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_(company)

https://tradingeconomics.com/france/employment-rate

Re: Amazon R&D spending is more than that of all companies and government of France

#87
post #67

Maybe they need to spend even more to figure out how to show Adidas shoes when I search “Adidas shoes”. Seems that’s a really hard CS problem. Once they have that, maybe they can show products ordered by price when I select “Sort by price low to high”.

It is a human problem, there's not necessarily a technical solution. How do you define a Adidas shoe? Something with the same name could easily be fake

Regardless of fakes, I would rather see fake Adidas show up when I search Adidas shoes than see a bunch of Nikes and New Balance.

Re: Amazon R&D spending is more than that of all companies and government of France

#88
Please remember that any publicly-traded company must follow guidelines, US-based or otherwise. There are rules for what constitute R&D for those who want to understand why 'company asked me to fill a report'

https://www.irs.gov/businesses/corporations/irc-41-asc-730-r...

Re: Amazon R&D spending is more than that of all companies and government of France

#89

Maybe they need to spend even more to figure out how to show Adidas shoes when I search “Adidas shoes”. Seems that’s a really hard CS problem. Once they have that, maybe they can show products ordered by price when I select “Sort by price low to high”.

One thing I absolutely cannot understand is the "price range" functionality seems to be broken as well. Maybe it's the same root cause and/or change which broke price sorting but when I put in a range of say $100-$200 searching for "network switch" the first result is $240, the 2nd result $90, and the 3rd result $120 and legitimate results go on for tens of pages. So it's not that there isn't anything for sale in tha…

It isn’t uncommon to say your price band is $100-200, then find something costing $250 which checks all the boxes. In this case, fuzzing prices while presenting results seems like an acceptable trade off.

Re: Amazon R&D spending is more than that of all companies and government of France

#90

Maybe they need to spend even more to figure out how to show Adidas shoes when I search “Adidas shoes”. Seems that’s a really hard CS problem. Once they have that, maybe they can show products ordered by price when I select “Sort by price low to high”.

You must have some sort of poisoned history with amzn. I just tried what you describe, and it works perfectly.

Poisoned History is a term I've never heard before, when it's really just algorithms and sponsored products pushing company interests over the users
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