Why we didn't make LSW-Vision-Smalltalk commercial available yet ?

To answer this question which is often asked by customers and interested Smalltalker's we must give a little extended explanation.

In the past we were not very enthusiastic about marketing LSWVST

•  we didn't believe that there is a market for a new Smalltalk which would allow us to create a business.
•  the Software-world is dominated by Java and now C#.
•  Smaltalk-enthusiasts would stay with their favorite Smalltalk-dialect.
•  the growths of the Smalltalk community that would pay for their tool is far too small.
•  Dolphin-Smalltalk is an excellent Windows-Smalltalk

We have adopted our Smalltalk-environment for our needs for years. Before Java - when the commercial world of Smalltalk was quite intact - we used commercial Smalltalk's for developing applications & libraries for our customers and there was no reason to create yet another Smalltalk. The Windows-Bindings of Visual-Smalltalk - which we have used were neither complete or ideal - but sufficient for our customers needs. Our Smalltalk was merely a extravagant research work. But after more than 15 years of development of LSWVST we can be proud to have a lot of things which are still missing in commercial Smalltalk's - a 100 percent Integration into the underlying OS. For a successful marketing of our Smalltalk we would have to change our firm fundamentally - including giving up our independency. we would loose also the freedom to extend, change and refactor our Frameworks as we are used today to do it. For almost all of us the fun would go away. And this additionally to all the problems  which even hit us as knowledge provider in the IT-market. As a small enterprise we observed rise and fall of software-firms and we would not like to be included in this game. We decided to produce with our LSWVST software-products and we developed LSW-DotNet-Lab, which is a developer-tool for .NET Programmers.

Recently Microsoft created Silverlight, a dynamic language runtime ( DLR ) which is still in a prerelease state. The focus of their DLR is not creating a competition to existing Smalltalk dialects - but it shows that Smalltalk as a language can get a solid market share back in the future.

Now - after we moved LSWVST to Windows-Vista we are rethinking the issue. We have still a long wishlist and fundamental work needs to be finished like our 64-Bit Virtual-Machine, the Linux and the Macintosh Version. As a first start we will publish LSWVST documentation. 

Frank Lesser.