Sounds like AdLib had management that fundamentally misunderstood their product and the market.
I see it a lot - it's all about the volume vs value thing. Companies would rather do a single deal with another B2B partner than have to do thousands or millions of individual retail sales. Just take a look at home networking products (my field of expertise, working with one of those large companies walking around broadcaster shows). If you go to the local electronics shop you'll see lots of retail brands. However even where one has a massive market share (here in NL a certain Shenzhen-based company acheives more than 50% of retail sales), they will pale in comparison with little-known ODM whitebox manufacturers who supply equipment to large providers in deals for millions of devices at a time. The latter earn less per sale, but make up for it in huge, long-term assured volumes.
Even though there is certain amount of overlap, sales, marketing and product focus need to be completely different for the two markets, even if the devices are technically identical. Mass marketing is very different to having three guys to talk to someone like me (for the technical stuff) and my commercial colleagues. Some companies manage to service both markets adequately (Creative comes to mind...), but AdLib clearly thought they were the non-retail kind of company. History says they weren't.
Back in 1990, audio in PCs was totally niche, so you weren't going to convince the big players to ship all their systems with a sound card in it. That wasn't even on the cards before Microsoft's MPC initiative, and even that was slow off the ground. I'd argue that sound cards didn't become standard until Windows 95. Until that time, sound was an almost purely retail activity. Moreover a lot of early multimedia PCs had custom sound solutions manufactured by (or at least for) the box vendor themselves, think IBM mWave Dolphin cards and Compaq's ESS-based cards with proprietary PC speaker connection behind the ISA slot. Possibly AdLib could have wanted part of that market, but they were at least 4 years too early - and a lot of the selling points of the custom solutions relied on other technologies that weren't possible or relevant in 1990: modems were even less standard than sound cards, PCs weren't powerful enough and didn't have enough storage to act as answerphones and the idea of putting a CD player into one was alien.
They should have firmly focused on retail, and on gamers. Still, the comparison to Sir Clive - and many others including IBM themselves - is valid: AdLib was far from the only company failing to understand what this new "Personal Computer" market was turning into and where succesful money could be made with it.