“The World Wide Web wasn’t publishable”
October 21st, 2009
William Cook’s ECOOP 2009 banquet speech is online; I nodded a lot while reading it.
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I’m pretty skeptical about these stories about the Web and academia, or, at least, the message drawn from them. Tim is a *terrible* writer, esp. of academic papers. So I don’t know that the Web wasn’t (academically) publishable per se instead of that no one really seriously tried to publish it. And its not like it isn’t well published now
So, what again was the failure?
(I really should spelunk the early conferences and interview some folks to get more details.)
That whole paragraph seems incoherent: Academia missed the web! Academia is pagerank controlled. But commercial is money driven!
(But what does that have to do with the early Web?)
“Academics tend to assume that the way it is supposed to work is for the academics to do fundamental research that creates amazing new ideas, which are then transferred to industry for implementation.”
Totally not my experience
Just about everyone I know is passionately interested in hearing about problems faced by industry so they can work on them (preferably within their normal line of research). Obviously, they’d like to work on them at a research, not R&D level and that can make it difficult to formulate (or discern) the problems.
So, this is exactly what he says we should *move* to. Maybe he just hung out in lamer bits of academia?