Demise of Bloglines Shows Corporate Stupidity, But What Else is New?

Yeah, this is an off-topic post, but the announcement that Bloglines, one of the original aggregators of news, is shutting down in this week, strikes me as one of the biggest examples I can remember of how you can get killed by a lack of innovation and vision. (Think newspapers).
So how is it that a company bought for $10 million several years ago by Ask.com [a subsidiary of InterActive Corporation (Nasdaq:IACI)] is simply shutting down? I'm sure some fired employees at some point will tell us the ugly inside tale, but for me it seems to be what happens when you are absorbed into a company that promptly forgets about you, stifles innovation and watches as competitors pass you by. (Like when the Sidekick cellphone company was bought by clueless Microsoft and butchered).
Where was the Bloglines iPhone App? How about the iPad? Brilliant startups like Pulse by Alphonso Labs and Flipbook and aggregators like the HuffingtonPost were eating the lunch of companies like Bloglines, which seemed to have an interface stuck in the 1990s.
Officially, the company blamed the decision on Facebook and Twitter, but that's totally LAME. Facebook and Twitter are making other companies rich, if they know how to exploit their power.
Obviously Ask.com had no idea how to do that.
I know in my business, and I'm sure you do in yours, you run into stupid executives making stupid decisions all the time. Usually because they are afraid to innovate. (The New York Times also has another excellent example in a takedown of Nokia's failure to develop touchscreen phones even though they had their first prototype three years before the iPhone. The execs said: Too risky. And Steve Jobs is still eating their lunch.)
Bringing this home to iRobot, I'm growing concerned that they aren't innovating fast enough and are growing too risk averse after hearing again and again from analysts that they need to focus on the short-term bottom line. Two of their cofounders, Rodney Brooks and Helen Greiner, had to leave the company to pursue their visions and start up other robotics companies, presumably because iRobot didn't want to deal with the risk in-house. Now, the company's iconic product, the Roomba, is under attack from a new crop of capable, innovative competitors. It needs innovation, and it needs it now.