The company I worked for in 1996 made all kinds of money from Visual Basic development for clients. We built what one would call a CRM system, we built a legal document management system, we build a CMS for early web site publishing (kinda sorta echoing wordpress), we build a timecard entry system. The rapid prototype and good debugging support meant quick time to market. And you'd still be able to run them all with the VB6 runtime preinstalled on every windows machine in the world. I recently discovered various projects of that era on my archive and was kind of scratching my head on what those .cls files meant, and chuckling over my comments from 30 years ago...