It depends on the department. My salary (in a mature product) was already amortized - I suspect the same is true of all their other mature products like Search, Maps, GMail, Chrome, YouTube, etc. But I think they were deducting salaries in the more research-like areas like Gemini, Jax, Assistant, etc. So there is net still a fairly large charge related to it, even if it isn't as large as it could be.
- In a steady state where you're spending the same amount every year, the tax burden of amortized vs. unamortized accounting makes no difference. It only matters for R&D - i.e., new products.
- I read once, although I have no idea how accurate this is, that a company could classify maintenance expenses (i.e., paying SREs and some SWEs to keep the service running and fix bugs) as non-R&D and therefore be able to amortize. That's another advantage to mature services over new services.
