I don&#x27;t think you understand the point being made about different kinds of research. You are correct, it is not &quot;kind that will never go anywhere&quot; and &quot;kind that is visionary&quot;.<p>But I <i>do</i> think we can separate &quot;kind that is incremental improvement on existing systems&quot; and &quot;kind that is visionary change of existing systems&quot;. This is particularly true in computer systems research. It&#x27;s common to see a paper where people tweak a small part of an existing system; I consider that incremental research, and it is necessary. But the <i>value</i> of such incremental research is dependent on the assumptions made by the researchers. Often, those assumptions are informed by impressions of what is important to the wider field of computing, and the author is saying those impressions are often misguided.