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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

#111

Post by eru »

gotmedium wrote: post #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...

Non-US based publicly traded companies would likely not have to follow guidelines of the American IRS?

(Though, of course, that might be wrong. American SEC tries to have global jurisdiction, whether you want them to apply to you or not. Matt Levine writes about that a lot in his 'Money Stuff'.)

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

#112

Post by Marsymars »

pmarreck wrote: post #33

And yet Alexa still sucks compared to modern LLM's

Seems to me like products with entirely different use cases. Alexa's not so good at generative text content, but ChatGPT isn't very good at triggering kitchen timers and home automation shortcuts via voice command.

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

#113

Post by eru »

cj wrote: post #31
kube-system wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Research and development is the set of innovative activities undertaken by corporations or governments in developing new services or products, and improving existing ones. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_and_development

IRS definition is probably more relevant: https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-regs/research_credit_basic_sec41... (Not 100% sure this is the most up to date definition but it gives you an idea)

Perhaps more relevant for Amazon, but not for France?

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

#114

Post by jknoepfler »

Sai_ wrote: post #103
jknoepfler wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

As a user, I don't want to be second-guessed. I can explore price ranges on my own, thanks.

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

#115

Post by dharmab »

paxys wrote: post #93

The "D" in R&D is development, i.e. software engineers writing day-to-day product code. So R&D budgets cover the majority of employee salaries and even stuff like cloud hosting. It's not earmarked for groundbreaking research as people seem to think.

When I worked at $BIGCORP we tagged all cloud accounts and Kubernetes Namespaces not serving production workloads as R&D ^

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

#116

Post by stagger87 »

karaterobot wrote: post #41
LeoPanthera wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems reasonable. The D does stand for Development.

For the concept of R&D to mean anything, the D has to imply development in the sense of translating the R part—research—into prototypes or new products. It can't just be classifying every web developer in the organization as part of the R&D department, even if they're a junior dev changing button labels on internal accounting software. Not saying that Amazon is using the term the way I'd like, just that if they aren'…

R&D means something very specific when it comes to tax implications (this context). Most companies I've worked for have included all software development time as R&D (including stuff like modifying buttons). Don't try to force some book definition on it, unless that book is the tax code for R&D tax credits, it doesn't work.

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

#117

Post by metaphor »

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

> I suspect its just a tax break related policy

1. What publicly-traded companies report to investors and what they report to the IRS are more different than you might initially suspect.

2. This $73.2B figure was pulled directly from their 2022 10-K filing[1] under an ops expense line item labeled technology and content, which includes R&D and then some. The devil in the details is buried in a footnote on p. 26:

>> Technology and content costs include payroll and related expenses for employees involved in the research and development of new and existing products and services, development, design, and maintenance of our stores, curation and display of products and services made available in our online stores, and infrastructure costs. Infrastructure costs include servers, networking equipment, and data center related depreciation and amortization, rent, utilities, and other expenses necessary to support AWS and other Amazon businesses.

At face value, to handwave this figure as just R&D and purport that it's directly comparable to other publicly-traded companies who report disaggregated research and development strikes me as somewhere between shotgun analysis and hoodwinking.

[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000101872423...

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

#118

Post by fooker »

CivBase wrote: post #97
fooker wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Recognize names of well-known brands in search queries and filter (or at least prioritize) items by the associated seller? It's not exactly black magic.

What counts as a well known brand?

What's an associated seller?

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

#119

Post by fooker »

lotsoweiners wrote: post #87
fooker wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You would, yes.

Would you believe what drives more sales and what you think you want could be different?

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

#120

Post by Sai_ »

jknoepfler wrote: post #114
Sai_ wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

As a user, I don't want to be second-guessed. I can explore price ranges on my own, thanks.

How do you ever buy flight tickets then?

It’s all about trade offs and checkboxes(layovers, specific terminals, airlines, aircraft body types, price ranges, dates, non-stops, insurance, in-flight Wi-Fi, meals, early boarding) etc.

Do you first look through the page with all the options, then open different tabs with each unique combination of checkboxes and options enabled/disabled? That must exponentially (literally) harder than simply viewing fuzzy results on screen and pruning the decision tree in your head.

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