I, for one, agree that the pace of technological innovation has somewhat slowed down of recently. Compared to nuclear energy, television, the space race, the complete eradication of small pox, personal computers, test tube babies, and the internet, the last 10 years seem a little disappointing. Modern miracles like the iphone and even-faster broadband and faster JavaScript engines seems like incremental improvements rather than major breakthroughs like quantum computing or true AI or whatever. On the other hand, a lot of people are trying and succeeding and changing people's everyday lives with the technology we have, so maybe it's good that we've had a little breather for industry to catch up to science, as it were.

Technological development in the United States between WWII and the last decade was propelled by a couple of conditions that don't exist currently, most notably the Cold War spurring billions of federal dollars into technological research and a few big-ass monopolies dumping billions of dollars into long-term research.

The Space Race raised the profile of science and math education in the US, and quite a lot of modern technology has roots in the space program or military programs, including a lot of CS-related technologies. The internet was a military project, and the US has had AI run their logistics since 1991. A lot of industrial-type innovations, including manufacturing and deployment operations, nuclear technology, and the first digital computers even trace back to WWII. The US government was also a huge early adopter of computing technologies like mainframes, spurring private development.

Meanwhile a few large monopolies had major research labs, most infamously Bell and IBM. I'll be the first to admit that monopolies have drawbacks and usually aren't a good thing, but because they didn't have to worry so much about quarterly earnings they dumped massive amounts of revenue into long-term strategies. Such research investments are arguably important primary causes of desktop computers and our national communications infrastructure. Google and Microsoft seem to have assumed these mantles. Microsoft, for its part, is putting a lot of work into more fundamental research, although we haven't seen a big payoff yet. Google seems to spend a lot of time on pet projects like Wave. That's probably an unfair assessment, but their long-term horizons are more on the order of 18-month product cycles than 10-year research projects.

So that's my take on it. The military-industrial complex and industrial monopolies allowed for massive projects to create big-ass breakthroughs. Without those drivers, academic research has delved into political infighting for funding and companies have become myopic so our view of 'innovation' becomes faster paced, but incremental rather than revolutionary. There's been more focus on use and users, but at the cost of fundamental developments. Whether this is "better" is anyone's guess. Faster incremental improvements get to market faster and therefore affect day-to-day life more, but my personal opinion is that the pendulum ought to swing back towards the breakthroughs, at least temporarily, to give the rabid markets something big and juicy to improve upon some time soon.