Only one GUI has ever been seriously tried, and its best ideas date from the 1970s. Surely there are other possibilities. It should be possible to build interactive and distributed applications from piece parts. The future is distributed computation, but the language community has done very little to address that possibility. Let's go back to having the data come to the user instead.
System administration remains a deeply difficult problem.
Unglamorous, sure, but there's plenty of room to make a huge, even commercial, contribution. The world has decided how it wants computers to be. The systems software research community influenced that decision somewhat, but very little, and now it is shut out of the discussion. It has reached the point where I doubt that a brilliant systems project would even be funded, and if funded, wouldn't find the bodies to do the work. The community universities, students, industry, funding bodies must change its priorities.