Yes, I suspect that you are right. But it's depressing for a 40 year like myself who 'wasted his time' in academia. Somehow academia/research was nice earlier

Yes, I suspect that you are right. But it's depressing for a 40 year like myself who 'wasted his time' in academia. Somehow academia/research was nice earlier and I had some luck getting tolerable positions, etc. But it's been tough keeping the wolves at bay lately. The average academic department is a real viper's pit. And crossing chasm from research to a product that people are willing to buy is not easy. Perhaps not even possible in my case... It's OK. I never really aspired to be a big-time industrialist. I was always more interested in having an impact in a hard area. Lately I have come to the conclusion that the best thing for me to do would be to get back to publishing... If you try to role out a product as an academic, your publication rate fall off and the vipers come out and bite you (Usually in the form of giving you lots of bad teaching assignments and a variety of psychological warfare techniques). But it's hard to convince oneself that most of what academics write has any effect. I suppose I could focus more on databases, but natural language interfaces seem to be where there are still fundamental problems. But our publications in that area are usually so dense that only fellow academics bother to read them... It's not easy to change the world I suppose :-).