what the author of this quote doesn't seem to understand is that the primary output of academic research in CS is not an industrial-strength implementation of a

what the author of this quote doesn't seem to understand is that the primary output of academic research in CS is not an industrial-strength implementation of an actual product, but rather is a prototype whose ideas can be transferred into future products. it's unreasonable to expect a group of graduate students and professors to build software on par with well-tested, well-QAed open-source or commercial products ... i agree that researchers often don't have an incentive to make robust, industrial-strength implementations of their work, but some systems hackers are actually quite good at making real software that people actually use. examples: - Unison file synchronizer (UPenn research project) http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/ http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/ - gprof program profiler (http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=989401 http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=989401) - the Scala language (http://www.scala-lang.org/ http://www.scala-lang.org/) most of the time, though, the way that CS systems research impacts the world is by: a.) the researchers founding their own company from their research - e.g., VMWare, and more recently KSplice (http://www.ksplice.com/ http://www.ksplice.com/) b.) a big company implementing features in their own products based on research findings - e.g., machine learning at Google, OS security in Google Chrome, and even gasp OS security in Microsoft Windows OS