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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

#131

Post by jknoepfler »

Sai_ wrote: post #120
jknoepfler wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If I say I want to fly on Tuesday, 2/2/2029, with a departure between 8-11am, economy, and ask you to show me options sorted by cost (descending), you should show me exactly those results.

You could offer me a flexible search option, as some sites do (+/- x days on flight times, etc.). Great! Now I can request that we search within a date range. Nice! That might be a good feature for some people!

Offering a simple query interface that returns what it says it will doesn't mean we can't offer flexible search parameters.

Flights are a terrible example of where I'd want to offer fuzzed results... having booked flights on the wrong day before, the last thing I want is to ask for X, but get offered Y.

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

#132

Post by [deleted] »

metaphor wrote: post #117
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: >>…

[deleted]

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

#133

Post by Sai_ »

jknoepfler wrote: post #131
Sai_ wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If I say I want to fly on Tuesday, 2/2/2029, with a departure between 8-11am, economy, and ask you to show me options sorted by cost (descending), you should show me exactly those results. You could offer me a flexible search option, as some sites do (+/- x days on flight times, etc.). Great! Now I can request that we search within a date range. Nice! That might be a good feature for some people! Offering a simple qu…

There are so many decisions other than just the dates that you implicitly make (or are made for you when you book your flight). Do you want insurance? Wi-Fi? Extra leg room? Turbo prop aircraft? Jets only? 2-3-2 seating? 3-3 seating?

Logically, you should want to control each of these variables while searching for flights. If you are ready to trust a flight aggregator with these choices, some fuzziness in price seems acceptable too.

You are probably thinking that you don’t want to make a choice about aircraft type or seating configuration and so, whatever the search engine shows in whatever order is fine by you. If so, consider that others might have the same ambivalence towards price fuzziness.

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

#134

Post by thaumasiotes »

alberth wrote: 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...

> It's no surprise, Amazon market cap is > 50% of the entire country of France GDP.

That isn't a comparison that makes sense. It's sort of like confusing stocks and flows, but market capitalization isn't even a stock.

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

#135

Post by acchow »

nraynaud wrote: post #83
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

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.

So instead of spending $0 on not having that employee, the company would rather hire than employee for $50k to get back $25k in tax savings?

This doesn't seem like a profit-driven decision.

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

#136

Post by foofie »

fooker wrote: post #119
lotsoweiners wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I don't think your argument holds water. A while back I read some article about how search is handled in companies like Amazon and surprisingly one requirement they have is appeasing key sellers. There were major political battles driving the decision on what search results should be boosted in specific search keywords just because a representative for company A insisted quite strongly that should be the expected result, while rep from company B had a very different point of view.

I'm sure Amazon does optimize results based on conversion, but only fools believe search results are optimal based on concrete criteria.

Also, some search results are clearly awful. Once I saw canned fish items showing up while searching for USB drives.

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

#137

Post by rightbyte »

eru wrote: post #107
wharvle wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is research and development. Not 'or', though.

I mean I work in a RnD dep. now and it honestly is some R but like 2% of my time.

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

#138

Post by eru »

Jensson wrote: post #130
eru wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Right, software development, but not software maintenance. The issue is with companies filing maintenance under development, since both of those has the same "Software Engineer" title. In other industries there is usually a very clear separation between development and maintenance.

Well, software doesn't need any traditional maintenance. It doesn't wear out. Any maintenance is new development.

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

#139

Post by saratogacx »

dekhn wrote: post #3

I believe Amazon classifies all costs of software engineering under R&D.

When I worked there I had to fill in the forms for my team (Internal tools development). R&D was for all new feature development, time spent working on tickets/support/etc. were all non-R&D. Typically a 6:1 ratio R&D:not.

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

#140

Post by albert180 »

GuB-42 wrote: post #51
albert180 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Tesla Battery Tech" is called Panasonic and CATL Battery Tech

I am actually curious to know who does what? Tesla and Panasonic and CATL are doing R&D on batteries. And Tesla and Panasonic are known long-term partners. So, how do they share the R&D? Do they research different topics (chemistry, manufacturing, etc...), does Tesla pays Panasonic to do the R&D? Directly or indirectly? Tesla must have played a major role regarding battery technology. Other EV manufacturers too, but…

Panasonic and CATL do research on battery chemistry and cells, and Tesla buys them to build battery packs for their cars
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