Research: when does it matter?

Does academic research matter?

I’m not a very good historian, but I seem to recall that rresearch as we know it arose out of the German model. It proved invaluable at least in the Second World War. Or did it?

Of course, Tim Berners-Lee owe to academic research some of the ideas that lead to the Web. Some. But not that much, really. Tim Bray is not exactly from academia, is he? Yet, XML changed the world in a deep way.

It seems like academic research is more and more irrelevant… or is it progressively more underfunded, or mismanaged… or just simply totally irrelevant?

Here’s a theory: we’ve come to define success by the number of publications… yet, amazing folks like Tim Bray don’t necessarily go out of their way to submit papers. They listen, they talk, they write within communities and then they publish proposals. They probably hack some software too. So, maybe academic research is becoming irrelevant because we have success wrongly?

Why would the public respect people whose main achievement is a (smallish) number of 10 pages documents they get in books hardly anyboyd ever read.