The years I spent in academia, learning my craft, so to speak are full of good memories. It is disappointing that these days so much less research seems to be done in an academic environment. Looking for current research on virtualisation turns up papers from EMC, IBM, HP, SUN etc. Nothing wrong with that as very good research is no doubt done and researchers are (I suspect) better paid, funded and resourced than they would be in today’s typical academic institution.

Companies however, are fundamentally different institutions from Universities and are ultimately driven by the lure of profit. I have not been in touch with academia for many years but I would like to think that the ivory towers still exist to provide an environment where researchers can follow any idea for no other reason than it is interesting to them. Call me old fashioned but I think there is great value in that and I don’t see much evidence of that taking place these days.

Perhaps it does and I am just out of touch, having spent pretty much my whole career working for large companies.

IT is lucky. “Ideas” are relatively cheap and easy to try out, either empirically by writing some code, or building some hardware or by mathematical modelling. Cheaper than building a multi million dollar particle smasher under the French/Swiss border anyway. On the flip side, being cheap and easy encourages people to work more in isolation, the early development of Linux by Linus Torvalds being an example.

Sure, there are communities and user groups but these are typically geared towards specific products and the problems and future development of them.

It’s not a question of quantity. IT by it’s very nature is constantly innovating, evolving and producing new ideas. It is the quality of the ideas I am worried about. I suspect, if the state of academic research were improved, IT would be rewarded with some truly remarkable things.