By now I'm sure you've seen the IBM announcement on VisualAge Smalltalk, and the Instantiations announcement as well - the latter being a future roadmap for VA from Instantiations. We've been aware of the coming end of life for VA (at IBM) for awhile now, and have been talking to partners about providing a roadmap for interested developers. We don't have anything specific to announce that way today - but we will shortly. Expect to hear something concrete by the time of Smalltalk Solutions 2005 in Orlando.

What should you take from these announcements? First off, you should take a fresh look at Cincom Smalltalk - it's cross platform (including multiple Linux platforms and Windows CE). It's binary portable. It's a full software stack, supporting modern standards like WS*. It includes two premier Smalltalk environments - VisualWorks and ObjectStudio. Cincom is fully committed to Smalltalk - we have the largest staff of developers of any Smalltalk vendor, and have been doing more forward development than any vendor. If you want a stable, secure platform that is under active development by many of the leading luminaries in the Smalltalk world, then you should download our product and have a look.

How do you know that we are committed to our product? We are profitable (both Cincom as a whole, and the Smalltalk business inside it). We are also eating our own dogfood - the main Smalltalk site is a VW ssp driven site, as is this blog server. The various services provided on this server (surveys, downloads, the Wiki) are all Smalltalk powered. We believe in our product enough to use it.

As I said above, we'll have more to say on this shortly - in the meantime, you'll be happy to know that a move to Cincom Smalltalk won't include any so-called "modernization" materials advising you to migrate to less powerful and more expensive technologies. Questions? Feel free to comment, or send email to Suzanne Fortman (our Smalltalk marketing manager), or me.