I didn't say people in industry weren't smart. There's plenty of stuff that gets published at conferences where the industry guys are like, we did that 15 years ago.

My argument is that there's lots of great-in-theory but untested-in-practice stuff in academia, and that you can't discount something altogether just because it's untested. It's hardly fair to compare the output of a few grad students over a few years with all of the effort that goes into a major industrial product.

And anyway, the architecture of Linux originated in academia too.