Similarly, one of the cofounders of VMware, Mendel Rosenblum, is a CS professor at Stanford, and VMware’s first products were built on his academic research into hypervisors.

Academic research has had far more practical significance in this space than you give it credit for. Meanwhile, Virtual 8086 mode’s limitations meant it had limited value except as a backward compatibility environment for running legacy DOS software on newer operating systems (Windows, OS/2, Linux, etc), and as the years passed that use case became less and less relevant-V86 mode is essentially a technological dead-end. The academic research which went into VMware and Xen left a major mark on the whole industry.

And if you read academic papers on hypervisors, you’ll see IBM’s mainframe virtualisation technology cited as prior work, again and again and again.