From an anonymous submitter:
Surprise, surprise, the biggest R&D spender in recent years is Volkswagen. Multiple sources, here's one from Fortune - http://fortune.com/2014/11/17/top-10-research-development/:
Volkswagen
- R&D spending in 2013: $13.5 billion
- As a percentage of revenue: 5.2%
For the third year in a row, the German carmaker tops the Strategy& list of research and development spenders. Volkswagen says its spending results from being a “highly competitive and innovative car manufacturer which must fulfill a whole host of environmental and safety standards.” Much of that spending has gone into hybrid vehicles and adding new technology, including semi-autonomous features to some of its 12 brands. It also is looking to reduce CO2 emissions across its fleet and invest in ways to electrify vehicles.
The rest of the list from 2013: Samsung, Intel, Microsoft, Roche, Novartis, Toyota, Johnson & Johnson, Google, Merck
A projected list for 2015 from the WSJ, http://blogs.wsj.com/corporate-intelligence/2014/06/11/boosting-rd-spending-u-s-companies-lead-but-volkswagen-is-king/
- Volkswagen (Germany): $17.4 billion
- Intel (U.S.) $13.6 billion
- Roche (Switzerland): $11.9 billion
- Microsoft (U.S.): $11.9 billion
- Google (U.S.): $10.9 billion
- Johnson & Johnson (U.S.): $10.3 billion
- Novartis (Switzerland): $10 billion
Maybe this is why I can't stand the "driving nanny" features in recent Volkswagen cars (the ones available in USA)? They seem to think they know what I want...but they are wrong enough of the time that it ticks me off.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by wonkey_monkey on Monday April 27 2015, @02:20PM
Surprise, surprise, the biggest R&D spender in recent years is Volkswagen.
Why the sarcasm? This could well be a surprise if you haven't been following this list for the last few years.
Volkswagen did not immediately spring to mind when I read the headline.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Nerdfest on Monday April 27 2015, @02:49PM
Me neither. I thought I'd see IBM up there, but not these days I guess.
It's surprising Apple isn't up there, them being so innovative and all :) . I am actually surprised to see Microsoft so high in the list.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by canopic jug on Monday April 27 2015, @03:15PM
Not all the line items for R&D may actually be R&D. M$ probably just relabeled the line item from marketeering which was their largest expenditure a while back. IIRC their spending on everything else was much smaller and they were getting razzed for it. Now their line item for R&D may seem much larger, but I bet it includes a lot that others do not consider R&D and may belong more under marketing or mergers and acquisitions.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bob_super on Monday April 27 2015, @03:51PM
It's a lot cheaper to prototype twenty iphone shapes and their ten PCBs, than fifty working hybrid cars... I don't know who does the coding for VW CPUs, but the comparison doesn't bother me.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by rts008 on Monday April 27 2015, @05:47PM
Apple?
How innovative is it to round corners?
I will say that Apple seems to refine things successfully, but I don't see them as innovative that much.
Apple's forte is polishing the knobs. ;-)
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 27 2015, @06:21PM
If they sold some of their knob polishing devices, they would make a killing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 28 2015, @12:50AM
It's not a product, it's a service practiced by their fanbois.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 27 2015, @03:05PM
Would be another comparison of interest as advertising often eclipses R&D costs. Turns out the spam these corps churn out is really expensive.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 27 2015, @08:17PM
With M$ on the list, I'd like to see the numbers these companies spend on lawyers compared to their other expenditures.
...and, as you hint at, getting shills in Lamestream Media to say positive things about them and to regurgitate their press releases surely costs M$ a huge amount in ad expenditures.
...not to mention the practice of giving a "gift" to an individual "journalist" of a new laptop pre-loaded with Redmond's latest OS.
Meanwhile, can someone remind me of something MICROS~1 has produced in the last few years that is actually new and unique.
I'm completely serious here.
I can't think of anything that is evidence of R&D activity on their part.
Extra points if that is something that is actually better than what Redmond produced previously.
Double extra points if is better than what the competition is producing.
...and let me say that I'm not at all surprised to not see the fruity bunch in Cupertino on the list (despite them being the top-grossing company on the planet).
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by Zinho on Monday April 27 2015, @10:01PM
I've heard about a few interesting projects out of Microsoft's R&D labs, I've just never heard of them being commercialized. The example I remember off the top of my head was a utility for stitching together a bunch of photos into a decent panorama. In the years since that's become commonplace, but it was novel at the time.
I just spent a minute paging through their official R&D website, [microsoft.com] and it seems like a lot of their machine vision research these days is bent towards making the Kinect work better. [microsoft.com] An article on techhive [techhive.com] seems to confirm this, listing the ways Microsoft is trying to turn your living room into a Star Trek style Holodeck as best they can.
Of course, since I'm a pessimist, I'm never going to connect one of those to the Internet in my home for fear of having the info snooped by third parties. Can't blame them for trying ;)
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
(Score: 2) by sigma on Tuesday April 28 2015, @01:03AM
The example I remember off the top of my head was a utility for stitching together a bunch of photos into a decent panorama.
Except that it wasn't novel even then, just difficult to do with the hardware of the day. I did something similar with a VLab Motion card and AREXX scripts on an Amiga 2000/'030 long before MS "invented" the idea. It worked, but took several days to render...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Monday April 27 2015, @03:52PM
I immediately wondered how the strong US dollar affects this list, since an EU company is on top. How does VW's R&D expense in euros stack up to, say, Google's expense in dollars? This list would be more interesting if the list was done as a percent of something (revenues, market cap, or something) and normalized like baseball's wRC+ stat, or how comic book sales are percent-weighted with Batman as 1.000, so you could see how companies stack up to each other. I'm not sure what this list in dollars is actually telling me.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 27 2015, @06:26PM
normalized like ... comic book sales are percent-weighted with Batman as 1.000
Really? That's obvious in retrospect, and quite awesome. Do you happen to have an easy link or copy-paste of some data just so I can see some comparisons (and hopefully analysis too... maybe)?
(Score: 2) by FakeBeldin on Monday April 27 2015, @08:00PM
I originally read "10 biggest D&D spenders".
What a pity :)
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Monday April 27 2015, @09:30PM
What is all this about R&B suspenders?
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh