VB6 could do all these things and more, in the 90's I built just the right small parts in C++ to glue things together, and we could do multi-processing, resilie

VB6 could do all these things and more, in the 90's I built just the right small parts in C++ to glue things together, and we could do multi-processing, resilient multi-server setups, and much much more. Serving HTTP for some always-limiting browser was an obvious easy sidenote, ie. what your mantra "available on the web" wraps in silver, but leveraging the full power of the desktop and OS was what power users actually wanted, and would still want now if the apps were there. I think some people at Microsoft realized VB had the potential to canibalize a lot of what they wanted as their proprietary backyard, and they killed the baby before it would grow into more of a mass movement. Now they succeeded, many that would have been educated into owning their computers now mindlessly click on "Yes" and are lost in the adds panopticon, but then MS had to non-compete some of the pie off to Google and co...