Several years ago, I had lunch with a former Smalltalk dev who gave me his perspective on what happened. He recounted it as IBM's entrance into the Smalltalk w

Several years ago, I had lunch with a former Smalltalk dev who gave me his perspective on what happened. He recounted it as IBM's entrance into the Smalltalk world, which wold be today's equivalent of a FAANG member deciding to compete in your niche. This caused several major Smalltalk providers to believe they had to unite in order to compete. Internal conflict within the Smalltalk providers eroded development and when IBM changed to push Java ("which falsely claimed to do what Smalltalk already did, like be able to run on a toaster" is the quote I roughly remember), this led to the collapse, when others followed IBM's lead. Seeing how smaller companies like to follow FAANG's technology choices today, combined with the profession following free-as-in-beer options, this also seems like an alternative plausible explanation. EDIT: I'm not blaming IBM or Java, I've just used this to inform my own technology choices for my knowledge portfolio.