What products in what time are we talking about here? Smalltalk environments often were priced where only enterprises could pay for them. What advanced product tried to compete on the hobbyist front, i.e. comparable to Turbo Pascal/Delphi on the pricing range?
And around here, enterprise SmallTalk is about the same size as enterprise Perl. Java, which is definitely an enterprise creation, was and is the big killer here. Both on the consuming side and the producing one.
Sure, but where those the advanced environments that were cancelled by people hopping on the Linux/C/etc bandwagon? I don't think that the argument goes with more funding Little Smalltalk would've been our software savior.
There sure was a lot of abandoned programming environments, but it was usually the enterprised that fathered them that killed it. NeWs was more interesting than pretty much all of its successors. And I'm sure the Lisp Machine or Oberon grognards are willing to chime in, too.
Everything being boring AF, both on the hardware and software side, certainly enabled Linux to succeed. It's a lot easier to compete if the state of the art is libc and X11.
