I think it's more that the low hanging fruit has been plucked than that there is a 'fall' of industrial research labs. Just like with technology in the early 20th century there was a golden age where advances were relatively quick and dramatic because the fields were brand new. Once the field matures it takes more effort to get up to speed on what has already been learned and evolutionary progress rather than revolutionary takes over.

And so far we seem to be doing pretty good with that level of progress. Any faster than this and I'm not sure we'd be able to properly integrate technology into our culture and society before it had become obsolete already.

Just look at for instance the succession of audio recording and distribution methods to get an idea of that: the gramophone record lasted for many decades, CDs succeeded them and lasted for a couple of decades, digital formats are dying out about as fast as they are being created (with the exception of mp3).

At some point you're going to have problems of interoperability simply because of the speed of progress (we're seeing something quite close to that on the browser front right now).