Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000)

Gmail is lame compared to Outlook 2000. (It also broke self-hosted email for everyone.) Likewise Google Docs can’t hold a candle to Office 2000 (or even Word Perfect 6.1). It has extremely bare-bones control over text formatting and page layout. E.g. no kerning, limited styling, no footnote styles, limited control of header/footer formatting, no section breaks, etc. No section breaks! The version of Word Perfect I installed from a stack of floppy discs had section breaks!

Microsoft's web apps are a grim reminder of how desktop UIs have evolved backwards. (I’m in the midst of evaluating Office 365 as part of some IT transitions at work.) It's missing tons of features even compared to Word 2000. And it's a total pig. I thought Office was a pig before, but moving it to the Web made everything 10x worse. (Google Docs is less of a pig, but that seems to be because it has less functionality than Gobe Productive on BeOS.)

I’ll concede that Google Maps is better than what was available in 2010. It bet it would be even better if Google turned it into a Win32 desktop app.

Great work has been done discovering side-channel attacks, but on the other hand most side channels have been created by sloppy microarchitectural design since 2000. So I dunno if that's progress. If we see some CPUs in the next few years that are both fast and not vulnerable, I'll count that as progress.

"What happened" was two-fold:

1. Starting especially a few years before 2000 but continuing today, the software industry is quite profitable, pays well, and has lots of openings, while the a academic job market in systems research continues to pay poorly and has much more limited openings. So if you want to do systems software research while also having an enjoyable quality of life, you might as well go to a company and get paid well instead of spending your days writing a thesis and grant proposals.

2. Computer science is a field where the cost of basic research equipment is low (a computer), and more interesting research environments generally are beyond the scale of academia (tens of thousands of hardware nodes, hundreds or thousands or more QPS of production load, etc.). That makes it quite different from e.g. biology or high-energy physics on one end where you usually need to be in academia to get access to the equipment or e.g. mathematics (including theoretical CS) and literature on the other where it doesn't matter where you are; in systems research you only get access to the equipment from being in industry.

That doesn't mean that systems software research, done in industry, is (or was or will be) irrelevant; it means that the narrower definition of "research" as "that which is done in academia" is inaccurate (including industry with the trappings of academia, i.e., people at Google or Bell Labs writing papers in academic journals and hiring people with Ph.D.s). Systems software research happens in industry and is quite relevant to itself.

I think it is a wild misunderstanding of how academic research works to say that the first demonstration of a concept is equal to all further work on a concept. It is like saying that the Human Genome Project isn't recent work because the structure of DNA was discovered in 1953.

Yes, please do demonstrate an ancient source of coverage-guided fuzzing, I would be very interested in that.