I am sure they have a lot of tiny performance improvements. But since when is CS research about tiny performance improvements?
It's not like Oracle or anyone else has any secret algorithm which runs in linear time when all of academia only knows of exponential time solutions for the same class of problems.
Do you think quicksort was an unimportant advance? After all, it's only O(n log n) in the average case, and is O(n^2) in the worst case. By your standards, it shouldn't have been seen as any kind of improvement over mergesort.
