I found this article about the fact that Microsoft outspends Mac by leaps and bounds on research and development, and yet Mac seems to be the company always giving us the products we want and need much faster.  While I’m not the Macolyte some people are, I do have to give Mac their props for creating a user-friendly computer that seems to have an OS that works more intuitively than Vista.  Oh, and that whole iTunes/iPod thing really seems to have worked out for them, and I hear they have this really cool phone, too.

Meanwhile, Microsoft is busy trying to buy Yahoo (and doing a spectacularly bad job of it).

You would think, though, with all the money they spend, that they’d be more innovative.  That is simply not the case, as the numbers bear out:

“…there doesn’t seem to be much correlation between R&D spending and innovation.After Microsoft came IBM ($6.2 billion), Intel ($5.8 billion), Cisco ($4.7 billion), and H-P ($3.6 billion). Oracle ($2.5 billion), SAP ($2.3 billion), Google ($2.1 billion), Sun ($1.9 billion), and AMD ($1.8 billion) rounded out the top 10″

So there you have it.  Apparently this money is just going down the tubes, and it’s not what you spend on R&D, but some other factor that makes you innovative.  If you could figure out exactly what that factor was, I’m sure you’d make yourself very rich.