How is it so ?

How is it so that when digg puts up a recommendation service online, it becomes one of the biggest success of the web, while 7 years before, some computer scientists, paid by public money, designed a very similar or even better system which ended nowhere, except for two papers in a administrative report, and presentation at the 9th meeting of INRIA with the Industry Also we are not talking of a small lab with small means, but the reference lab in france for computer science, with some 5000 phd's and a 160 MEUR budget. So if, on a domain where you have a strong need, with a strong solution, computer science laboratories can not make it a success story, it raises questions :

• What are they good for ultimately, if upon finding solutions they are not deployed ?
• If you consider that innovation in computer science is driven by usage, how such a disregard for use can not hurt the academic production of such labs ?

• On what ground will people be excited about doing computer research, when knowing that even if everything goes well, there work won't make a difference ?

As a counter example you can take (at least some) american universities, whose research projects are integrated in a more general project pipeline designed to foster innovation. As innovation gets mature, it raises new questions which will themselves create open problems to be solved. An illustration of this, based upon the very abstract subject of semantic web, is SIMILE at the MIT. Their website is definitely public-oriented, and more importantly, the work done is integrated in a pipeline where if potential is detected, it will be exploited, even if this potential has a minor chance of revolutionizing the n'th order langage compiler theory. No disregard for practical applications here, as having broad adoption is an integral part of surfacing finer issues which can be analysed, so that practice and theory are just one.