Resource update - Research and Development league table

The UK's Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) has produced a global league table of R&D expenditure for 2004 (http://www.innovation.gov.uk/projects/rd_scoreboard/introfr.html). In our dear old telecom sector, it's interesting to see companies like BT Group and TeliaSonera outgunning the likes of Vodafone (!) and AT&T. Tiny Belgacom spends as much per employee as AT&T, and TeliaSonera three times as much. Not a single RBOC appears on the list. It's also interesting, though hardly surprising, to see a company like Yahoo! outspending the average telco on a per-employee basis by a 7-to-1 margin. Even UK online bank Egg spends nearly three times as much as the average telco on this basis. A couple of very sharp bloggers have recently observed that "the IT industry has declared war on telecom," a view with which I wholly concur. If the development pipeline is genuinely what is going to differentiate the two camps, then data like this paints the telcos in an evermore dismal light.