Ian Betteridge @ianbetteridge takes the New York Times down in Did Apple and Google really spend more on patents than R&D?, in response to the NYT article The iEconomy: Apple and Technology Manufacturing (Subscription required):

Read the NYT piece, and you would think that the technology market has shifted from being about research and development of new products to being about acquisition of patents. Given that this is based on a single year, when some very big patent portfolios came on the market in one-off deals that aren’t likely to be repeated in the future, that’s a long way from the truth.