Yeah, there was tons of interesting stuff happening in R&D in the 90s. The problem was that Microsoft held a complete strangehold on distribution, which meant that for the average consumer (i.e. teenage me, not in Silicon Valley, and everyone I knew), it might as well not exist. I remember, when I first started to read academic papers and surf programming sites in college around 2003, thinking "Holy shit, there's all this cool stuff that was invented over a decade ago, and I can't use any of it unless I switch to UNIX."

What happened in the mid-2000s was that open-source software (and later Apple) finally broke Microsoft's hold on the route to the consumer, and suddenly small teams of people could deliver software that billions of people could use. There's a similar situation in R&D now; I remember that when I left Google 3 years ago, there was a whole lot of really cool stuff being developed that has yet to see the light of day. No corporation can hold innovation back forever though, because of Joy's Law: "No matter who you are, the majority of smart people do not work for you."