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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

#101

Post by roenxi »

mkj wrote: post #70
marcus_holmes wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Australia we have a tax break that means 80% of all R&D costs are repaid by the government. Everything we can ever possibly classify as R&D is classified as R&D. If I take a dump on company time it's R&D because I'm a software dev and therefore thinking about developing stuff while I'm in there.

That's not actually allowed, it's meant to be research with an "unknown outcome" or some similar wording. But lots of companies ignore yhat and claim regardless.

Interpreting that is my least favourite part of the R&D tax incentive - as far as I'm concerned practically everything has an unknown outcome. I can't figure out what we're doing in software and sometimes that even stretches to include after a product has been built. Most ideas have been had before in some form or another - it is just nobody at this company knows about it.

But genuine R&D would look very similar. There isn't a good test to distinguish "I don't know how to do this thing" from "nobody knows how to do this thing". I don't have the time, resources or inclination to know what everyone else knows. And then having to second guess what the tax office thinks everyone knows, because I know they'd accept some of the things I'm doing as research. It just isn't clear where they think the line is.

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

#102

Post by ClassyJacket »

lefstathiou wrote: post #71
rqtwteye wrote: post #60

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”.

Top of my wishlist is a “remove duplicates” feature that lets me see unique items for a search rather than a 100 derivations of the same thing.

Yes. I was looking for a vegetable dicer yesterday and gave up and just got one at Kmart, because Amazon was page after page of the exact same one over and over that had horrible reviews.

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

#103

Post by Sai_ »

jknoepfler wrote: post #96
Sai_ wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As a user, when I set a price range, I want the search function to return results within that range. I don't want fuzz. I don't want you to second guess me. I want the results I asked for. This is the natural, simple, user-friendly design I want. Don't give me some bullshit instead.

What if you (the user not you you) don’t know what price range will net them the feature set they want?

E.g., would you know exactly the price range to pay for a tool set which lets you do general repairs around the house? Should it be ₹100? ₹500? How will a search engine know for sure that you’re an aware customer who knows their price ranges versus a newbie exploring the space? Even google claims to have millions of results per query meaning they, for all their talk about organising the world’s information, don’t know what exactly you want.

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

#104

Post by marcus_holmes »

orbisvicis wrote: post #77
marcus_holmes wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Australia we have a tax break that means 80% of all R&D costs are repaid by the government. Everything we can ever possibly classify as R&D is classified as R&D. If I take a dump on company time it's R&D because I'm a software dev and therefore thinking about developing stuff while I'm in there.

Wait so if I'm a software dev in Australia whose hours are classified as R&D, and my employer pays a 20% tax rate, can I file my withholdings reduced by 80% too?

It's a process where you claim the rebate from the government. You need to have an ABN, and I think be incorporated (? not sure). And then, yes, you can claim away to your heart's content.

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

#105

Post by jknoepfler »

snewman wrote: post #65
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Tossing another anecdote onto the pile, I just searched "Adidas shoes". The first four hits are not for Adidas shoes, after that they all are. All four of those non-Adidas hits are "Sponsored" results, but that's not particularly easy to notice (for one of them it's almost impossible). I would agree with GP that Amazon product search often leaves much to be desired. It's hard to search for X without getting accessori…

It's just classical enshitification.

Now that Amazon has captured user-share, they will (ineluctably) abuse user good-will (by padding search results with ad-placed products the user does not want) until they reach some marginal breaking point. The users that remain are either oblivious or cursed with a lingering taste of bad-faith and bullshit.

Eventually the giant will strangle itself in its sleep, but that's probably 50+ years out given how these things go.

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

#106

Post by Marsymars »

ethbr1 wrote: post #81
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #74

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?

"Operations", I'd expect.

If you imagine a tech company that declares that they're feature-complete, and they cut expenses to those required to maintain existing service to a high degree of quality/reliability, that seems like a reasonable benchmark of spending that could be classified as "not R&D".

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

#107

Post by eru »

wharvle wrote: post #28
lnxg33k1 wrote: 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

Can confirm, filed some “R&D” hours at a company some years back that did software development but nothing I’d call “R&D”. They straight-up told us it was a requirement for some tax benefit or other. Like they did have us do it only on non-client work, but… it was not really R&D the way anyone means that.

The D in R&D literally stands for development. So 'software development' would fit.

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

#108

Post by eru »

3abiton wrote: post #54
pyrale wrote: post #24

Using the very same numbers, Amazon's R&D would be 11% of all US R&D. I suspect the numbers are wrong.

Ornas others pointed out, Amazon is boosting its RnD reporting.

Why isn't the rest of the US boosting their reporting?

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

#109

Post by [deleted] »

rqtwteye wrote: post #60

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”.

[deleted]

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

#110

Post by jknoepfler »

fooker wrote: post #67
rqtwteye wrote: post #60

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

If only globally distributed authentication weren't an unsolved problem... (how do I know I'm visiting an Amazon.com server controlled by Amazon?)
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