To address the two questions about "Why the death of new ideas", and "what to do about it"?
I suspect a lot of the lack of progress is due to the massive influx of capital and entrenched wealth in the industry. Sounds counterintuitive, but I think it's become conventional wisdom that any new idea gets one shot; if it doesn't make it at the first try, it can't come back. It gets bought by someone with entrenched interests, or just FAILs, and the energy is gone. A couple examples are tablet computers, and integrated office software. The Newton and several others had real potential, but ended up (through competitive attrition and bad judgment) squandering their birthrights, killing whole categories. (I was especially fond of Ashton Tate's Framework; but I'm still stuck with Word and Excel).
What to do? The first thing that comes to mind is Wm. Shakespeare's advice: "Let's kill all the lawyers." But now they're too well armed, I'm afraid. I actually think the best alternative is to find an Open Source initiative of some kind. They seem to maintain accessibility and incremental improvement better than the alternatives. But the industry has gotten big enough so that some kind of organic collaborative mechanism is necessary to get traction.
I also think that there's a dynamic that says that the entrenched interests (especially platforms) require a substantial amount of change - churn - to justify continuing revenue streams; and this absorbs a lot of creative energy that could have been spent in better ways. Look how much time we spend treading water with the newest iteration from Microsoft or Sun or Linux or Firefox, making changes to systems that for the most part work fine already. It's not because they are evil, it's just built into the industry. There's no such thing as Stable Equilibrium; all the feedback mechanisms are positive, favoring change over stability. (Did you ever see a feature withdrawn, or a change retracted?)
The other clue that has been discussed on SO is the Skunkworks Syndrome (ref: Geoffrey Moore): real innovation in large organizations almost always (90%+) shows up in unauthorized projects that emerge spontaneously, fueled exclusively by individual or small group initiative (and more often than not opposed by formal management hierarchies). So: Question Authority, Buck the System.