ParcPlace acquired competitor Digitalk and tried to create a Frankenstein hybrid - jigsaw? - that royally screwed things up.
Around the time, the industry was very exercised about a number of features that alledgedly made PP Smalltalk bad:
- non-native widgets (emulated) for windows - who cares now;
- principal deployment as a single process, not natively multi-threaded, using internal virtual threads - which actually scales better;
- must be able to run in the browser like java applets - :-)
- can't get my head round "image" model, must have individual files
This was all FUD. Developing in VisualWorks with Envy (Gemstone) centralised version control was a blissful experience I haven't seen bettered.
But yes, Smalltalk and C++ faced off in industry for a number of years for the crown and then along came Java on the OSS tidal wave that effectively destroyed the business model for VisualWorks that relied on expensive licences.