I think we should be very careful in these times when commenting on things such as R&D investments and mentioning amounts of money. As we all now know all too well, many companies invested lots of money, but in the wrong places, the wrong technologies and often times, just throwing good money after bad. Anyone who would question such a comment need only look at Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, General Motors, and Chrysler just to name a few. One glaring example might be to look at GM's big investments in gas guzzlers when it was plainly clear that gas prices were not going to stay down.

What a company invests versus how it invests it is what matters. Right now I don't have a lot of faith in Microsoft and being in the field a good deal these days I am hearing the same thing from end-users. Vista and Office 2007 are still percieved as large blunders and relative failures and over recent weeks I did hear two negative comments about SQL Server 2008 and saw it fail to run some very basic code that runs fine in 2005. Probably not a crisis, but it reminds me that software companies have to do updates to keep a revenue stream flowing, and how closely that is tied to truly "new technologies" and "improved performance" versus just keeping the bottom line pumped up - well, thats where the amounts may be impressive, but the reality may be quite different.