I don't think it's the consultancy that's under question -- it's the question of what RAD tools that companies that weren't necessarily "software first" reached

I don't think it's the consultancy that's under question -- it's the question of what RAD tools that companies that weren't necessarily "software first" reached for when they were working on stuff in-house. Banks, manufacturing companies, telephone companies, places that decided to roll their own rather than call up IBM or Accenture (well, whatever Accenture's predecessor was). I worked at a place like that in the 1990s, a successful CLEC with a huge IT department that wrote their own custom software for order tracking and sales management -- and they wrote it in Visual Basic and Access. That's a market that Smalltalk might have been extremely successful in, but it really was basically owned by VB/VBA in the 1990s.