Who knows what this new money will do with the old ad-financed entertainment parts of the internet. VR/AR could actually get a second chance and maybe “smart” devices more usefulness than spamming ads. I hope cities and municipalities discover their role as online activity promoters for offline life.

We are in a new phase and what you call stagnation is actually the maturity and stability of the internet that is spawning new services at the moment. For example:

Logistics are coming online. Loading lists, import/export paperwork, scheduling your truck unloading time from your smartphone. Lots of saas startups in that area.

Factories are coming online. Scheduling production across factories/countries on a single product level is still sci-fi, but they are working on it.

Trades are coming online. Billing software, planning, documentation. Each sector has their own ways to get accelerated and now they see value in it.

Plenty of stuff that was happening in excel sheets is replaced with a tailored web services which are content aware and allow live data entry/analysis from multiple end points.

There is so much work to be done. Universal availability and reliability of data centers, mobile networks, fibre connections were the backbone neccessary to build the next generation of services. They are in the making.

That is easy in software only, in hardware you would neglect economy of scale. It is more likely it gets sold as an innovation in some form to safe money and face.