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IT's Big Spenders
TechEGrl writes "R&D spending increased by 17 percent in 2006, according to a new report on CIO Insight that ranks the top 81 R&D spenders. The spending was mostly targeted at consumer rather than business products, though Microsoft — not surprisingly the biggest spender with an investment of $6.58 billion — did throw significant change at biz apps like the Vista operating system. Investment in Internet search was dominated by Google, which more than doubled its R&D spending in 2006 and far outpaced competitors like Yahoo and eBay."
A lot of people only look at Symantec's home user security products, but a lot of cash from R & D would flow towards some of its enterprise class products like NetBackup, which because of its sheer complexity of development would require a lot of dough.
"Never try to tell everything you know. It may take too short a time."
The text says 'top 81', then the article says 81 businesses were selected and appraised. The text labels Microsoft as being the biggest spender, at $6.58 billion, while also labeling this as 'software' related. The article points out how MS spent big on the latest XBox, which is hardware...someone needs to make up their minds. All-in-all, pretty sloppily written piece. But hey...it's a slow news day, so what the heck.
For a bit of fun perspective, China spent $136 billion on R&D in 2006.
And who could forget the Nov. 2006 study from Booze Allen Hamilton, which stated:
"R&D spending doesn't guarantee business success" - New study reveals that there is no relationship between R&D spending and sales growth, earnings, or shareholder returns.
The Booz Allen Hamilton study "Global Innovation 1000--Money Isn't Everything" analyzed the world's top 1,000 corporate research and development spenders.
It found remarkably that the pace of corporate R&D spending continues to accelerate, as many executives continue to believe that enhanced innovation is required to fuel their future growth.
Spending more doesn't necessarily mean gaining more. The study identified individual success stories. More pointedly it found no discernible statistical relationship between R&D spending levels and nearly all measures of business success, including sales growth, gross profit, operating profit, enterprise profit, market capitalization, or total shareholder return.
Booz Allen Vice President Barry Jaruzelski said: "Successful innovation demands careful coordination and orchestration both internally and externally. How you spend is far more important than how much you spend."
I pfft in your general direction!
3825 million euros was 4530 million dollars back then, of course. Hrm.
"did throw significant change at biz apps like the Vista operating system"
I call BS immediately. Nothing to see here, move along.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
Not saying the article isn't a POS, but the remarks that they spent most on software with the biggest recipient being the Xbox is perfectly accurate.
People need to remember - while Microsoft makes the Xbox they are NOT IN the hardware business. Every aspect of the Xbox's manufacture is outsourced. and it's design is a fairly simple one compared to say the PS3. The most complex part of the Xbox is by far the video chipset which is outsourced in it's entirety.
Sure Microsoft has a lot of input no doubt into the design of things like the CPu and the vieo chopset - but they don't put up most of the R+D costs there it is the manufacturer they outsource to that does. The vast majority of Microsoft's R+D last year in the Xbox was undoubtedly for things like Xbox Live the Xbox OS, and games. Hardware would be a very small portion.
Also, it would be far more interesting if we could determine the R&D spend that has come about from open source software (academics) or is directly spend on open source software (IBM, HP et al).
It is only a hunch, but I think the open source software has enabled, and consumed a massive part of global research and development -- but significantly, is not costed.
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