In that case, you're just wrong. Look at what has come out of systems research: Xen and its ilk created a huge jump in virtualization research. Microsoft and VMWare now have large paravirtualization as parts of their virtual machines, which we are seeing more and more uses for every day.
There are a number of other things that come to mind, mostly in high performance computing. Parallel FORTRAN is one of the most common HPC languages and I believe the primary development was based on work at Rice university.
The problem is that people too often get caught up on implementation: most academic departments do not develop "products," they work to develop ideas. Many of these ideas have been built on recently to produce successful products.
