Martin Kleppmann

There's not one thing.

Some people go full-on theoretical, mathematical, don't care about the real world at all, just want to work on things that are intellectually interesting, and that's fine.

And some people are very much at the applied end of wanting to do research that is likely to have a real world impact.

I'm more on the applied end, and that's fine too.

But a common distinction there is that academia can just think much longer term.

So the

You know, if you're doing a startup, you have to ship something within a few months.

You can't afford to think 10 years into the future.

Maybe you'll have sort of a sort of long-term vision that you're gradually getting towards, but you do have to really ship things on a fairly short timescale.

At a bigger company, maybe if you're working on infrastructure or so, you can think on a bit of a longer timescale because the

the requirements of what are needed are perhaps better understood.

And in that case, making sure that the system is scalable, operationally robust, and so on, it's then fairly clear what the requirements are.

And it's still a matter of implementing it.

But in that case, you can think a bit longer term.

But in academia, what I really appreciate is the freedom to work on things that are

are long-term and which are not immediately commercially viable or which are not aligned with the incentives of commercial companies.

So one research area that I've been on for several years now is what we call local-first software, which is this

idea that we want to take away a bit of the power from cloud operators and give it back to end users so end users should be more in control of their own data and less dependent on cloud services for providing the applications and the data that the users need and that's something that doesn't naturally come to companies right because software as a service businesses for example

The whole reason why they can charge a subscription is because they are able to essentially hold a gun to the customer's head and say, pay us your subscription, otherwise we will delete all your data.

And I totally understand the commercial imperatives that lead to that.