Comment by Panzer04

An academic paper needs to deliver its output once, for the research. Maybe someone will try to replicate it later but that's someone elses problem (and fairly often proves the output of the former to be wrong)

Some stuff in companies might be similar, but there's a lot of things that people use every day, in a lot of different ways, and the software needs to work correctly regardless. You can't just drop it like a hot potato once you've built processes around it.

As always, the first 80% takes 20% of the time/effort, the last 20% takes the other 80%.