What's New in Computer Research?

I think that I am slowly coming to the realization that there are only really three issues in computer science research: scalability, integration and usability. It feels like everything else has been done, whether as researchers we choose to acknowledge that or not. Seriously, though, all of the real issues seem to fall into one of those three categories, and if we could solve those, then we could focus on application areas rather than computer science research. For example, we know how to test software. The problem arises when we try to scale this testing to an enterprise application (e.g., IBM's WebSphere or CA's Unicenter). We have systems that automate large portions of business activities. The problem comes when we try to integrate these systems so that they work together (e.g., the procurement system with the accounting system with the personnel system). And we know how to detect potential security issues, such as viruses or phishing sites. The problem comes when we try to provide that information in an understandable, noticable, actionable way to the user. These are, obviously, just examples. But if you start to think about the underlying computer science problems, I think that you will find that they can ultimately be classified as being a problem of scalability, integration or usability. And if the problem does not fall in one of these three areas, I suspect that it is not actually a computer science problem, but rather falls into some other research (application) area.