Martin's arguments (summarized well by beilabs and stcredzero) are interesting and represent various real problems. But none are what killed Smalltalk. As alw

Martin's arguments (summarized well by beilabs and stcredzero) are interesting and represent various real problems. But none are what killed Smalltalk. As always, everything points to money... 1 - Smalltalk tech was owned by a small clutch of companies. All had revenue driven by developer licensing. None were able take seriously the thought of radical change to their revenue model. 2 - Lack of licensing costs for Javascript enabled it to be dropped into Netscape with Microsoft following suit. Lack of licensing costs for Java enabled Sun to give it away during a time when revenue for other Sun products was able to fuel the Java giveaway. 3 - Corporate decision makers took a wait and see approach to further engagement with traditional internal IT investment starting around 1996. This was mainly fueled by drive from within these companies to start focusing on internet strategy. Up to this point, most IT organizations were internal focused. 4 - All the major IT companies wanted to try their hand at capturing the internet technology stack. It took about a year, maybe less, to kill Smalltalk's momentum. In my retrospective opinion, the only thing that would have saved Smalltalk is for the investors at any one of the major Smalltalk vendors to make a radical shift in their business model and give away the core technology and runtime. This would have enabled Smalltalk to be dropped into a browser instead of Javacsript and enabled Smalltalk to make meaningful progress as an "open" language. Even if this happened, IT companies would have attempted to co-opt this new free-er Smalltalk in much the same way they did with Java and Javascript.