The "original" VB fell out of favor because the architecture didn't scale well. It was great for smaller projects, but shops that wanted bigger apps or stronger

The "original" VB fell out of favor because the architecture didn't scale well. It was great for smaller projects, but shops that wanted bigger apps or stronger abstractions to avoid reinventing the wheel had an easier time with Delphi and C++ with libraries. This isn't necessarily a bad thing because it's hard to make both small projects and big projects happy at the same time. But MS decided to focus on "enterprise" because the profit margins are usually bigger there. Thus, they mostly abandoned the original VB. This sent a shock-wave through the industry because their code base couldn't go anywhere. It did give a boost to FOSS, because it's less likely that a heavily used FOSS product will be outright abandoned.