I think that, for CS, this is actually a good thing: "industry" in general tends to be more interested in short-term gain and things which are immediately pract

I think that, for CS, this is actually a good thing: "industry" in general tends to be more interested in short-term gain and things which are immediately practical--they are creating the technology of tomorrow. Academics, on the other hand, are not bound by this; they can look into creating the technology of the far future. Another important difference is that CS research also goes on in industry, resulting in more diversity. There is no fundamental problem underlying the whole field--for every researcher working on things you find useless for industry, there are probably several working on things which are useful. Finally, this may be due to my university being more pragmatic than some, but most of the research going on that I've heard about is actually immediately practical. The single largest issue a ton of professors seem to be working on is parallelism and distributed computing, which is indubitably extremely important to industry right now. Of course, I could also only be seeing this because most of the professors that teach my classes or that I've talked to are affiliated with similar labs.