I actually wrote a long article on this [1]—and had a chance to interview some of the team that built the original version of VB that was sold to Microsoft. (Alan Cooper and Michael Geary; Michael actually frequents HN pretty regularly!)
My opinion is that it was a confluence of a few factors:
- Microsoft was very worried about the threat of Java/Sun, and rotated hard into .NET and the common language runtime as a response.
- The most vocal, but minority of VB users wanted more advanced functionality and a more powerful/expressive language (as is often the case). Couple with the shift to .NET, Microsoft listened to them: VB got a full rewrite into an object-oriented language and the IDE moved further away from the VB6 visual building paradigm. That left the silent majority high and dry.
- The web emerged. Working with the Win32 API was suddenly less relevant, and younger devs adopted PHP en masse, rather than adopting VB. (And existing VB6 devs upset about the change also migrated over when they could build for the web instead of Windows) Unforced error on Microsoft's part, since IE had 96% browser marketshare in 2001.
[1] https://retool.com/visual-basic/
My opinion is that it was a confluence of a few factors:
- Microsoft was very worried about the threat of Java/Sun, and rotated hard into .NET and the common language runtime as a response.
- The most vocal, but minority of VB users wanted more advanced functionality and a more powerful/expressive language (as is often the case). Couple with the shift to .NET, Microsoft listened to them: VB got a full rewrite into an object-oriented language and the IDE moved further away from the VB6 visual building paradigm. That left the silent majority high and dry.
- The web emerged. Working with the Win32 API was suddenly less relevant, and younger devs adopted PHP en masse, rather than adopting VB. (And existing VB6 devs upset about the change also migrated over when they could build for the web instead of Windows) Unforced error on Microsoft's part, since IE had 96% browser marketshare in 2001.
[1] https://retool.com/visual-basic/