For those of you fixated on R&D costs, let me bring you back to...

For those of you fixated on R&D costs, let me bring you back to a time when Alphabet (then known as Google) the technology behemoth was an ankle-biter.

A Brief and Slightly Dodgy History of The Internet According to MadMayHam

Readers here of my vintage (1980s) or older will remember a time of the search engine wars. In the 1990s, when download speeds were quoted in baud rates (24.4, 56.6 kbps), when we could all diagnose connections by the dial-up tones that were made, and downloads took so long you could conceive, deliver and raise a baby before your browser download completed, the WWW was still in it's infancy (having gestated out of DARPAnet and earlier projects), the internet was a maze of unsorted Web addresses (URLs), kind of like the wild wild west (also WWW!) where there was no "map" of the web, and popular websites such as chat rooms, MUDs (Multi-user dungeons) or BBSes (Bulletin board services) were handed down by word-of-mouth recommendations. Out of this chaos sprouted the grand dame of search technology, Yahoo!. A disruptor of its time, Jerry Yang et al. indexed large parts of the web (into what was known as web directories) and brought a little order to the internet.

In the following years, the Webcrawler was invented (code that autonomously searched and indexed the web) that improved upon the web directory and became the first search engine which made the WWW more searchable and ordered. Suddenly anyone could search for websites that suited their interests and find alternatives to websites that they had already liked and perused. Shortly after, there were other search / browser upstarts like Netscape, Lycos, AltaVista, Infoseek, AOL, which came barging in to grab a piece of the search engine pie. In 1996, 2 (then-) young punks Larry Page and Sergey Brin who were students at Stanford, saw that they could mathematically relate web sites to one another and developed algorithms to automatically generate relational linkages to rank search results. This was something that the other search engines could / did not do, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Comparing R&D Budgets

In 1996, Google technology was born out of PhD research, and no public information on their budget exists (to the best of my knowledge) and at best I would guesstimate it to be US$30,000 or below, considering that it was mainly mathematical and code. The earliest Google R&D information I could find was 1999's budget of US$2.93 million (https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/000119312504073639/ds1.htm) as stated in their 2004 IPO prospectus.

In contrast, Yahoo! spent US$72.37 million on R&D in that same financial year (http://getfilings.com/o0000912057-01-007693.html) -- a whopping 24++ times more that Google did.



Have You Been Paying Attention? Q&A Time!

I'll make it real simple (yes / no) so people with no shares, no intention to short nor buy but spend an inordinate amount of time on HC forums casting shade on this stock (you know who you are @shareman) can easily follow along.

Did Google have a viable product then?

YES.

Did Google get bought out by a larger entity?

NO.

BONUS: Fun fact in 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, approached Yahoo to sell Google for $1 million (1998 value). Yahoo refused the offer.

Does that mean Google is not worth much?

NO.

Is Google still the leader in the search engine, advertising, web analytics, etc 20+ years later?

YES.
Is Yahoo still partying like it's 1999?

NO.
In fact they were unceremoniously split up and sold in 2016 and parts of it still operate albeit under different owners.
Does that mean that companies (like Brainchip) with disruptive technologies can upend entire industries?

Heck YES!


BONUS BONUS INFO:

TakeawayWhen Google IPOed in 2004, I was an intern at a bank. On my meagre allowance I considered buying a few shares as I had just set up my trading account with a local brokerage. But I didn't. What if I met the girl of my dreams? I needed to wine and dine her or so thought my younger and no-as-wise self.

In retrospect , if I had bought 1 Google share at a split-adjusted price of approx $55.20, it would be worth $2567 as of time of writing. That's a 4650% increase.I missed out on that and a couple of other well known opportunities (e.g. Amazon) since then.

Never again! DYOR!