We had to focus on the Web as a platform because all other platforms failed to evolve, they reached their "nirvana point" where most things just worked, but they just stopped there. The twisted and contorted fucked up mess that we call the Web, that shares more with the Unix philosophy of "worse is better", has somehow managed to keep growing and evolving and will soon leave everything else in the dust, even if it will never get close to any "it mostly just works" point and it will never be better at any particular thing than anything else... it will just be "better overall" and it will keep growing, and businesses love growth so they will keep betting on it.
I think we need to concentrate on steering the Web's growth in the right direction, instead of bitching about how much it set us back (and I agree, it did, but it's a "platform cost" that was/is worth paying if you want to "ride the wave" instead of sinking with your favorite ship and then swimming back to the surface every time a new Smalltalk ship show up floating, then sinks and then a new one comes and so on... as an example, even choosing to develop a desktop app or a native iOS app instead of an HTML5/Javascript one with minimal backend is basically "riding a sinking ship", even if you'll make profit out of it and even if you'll deliver a better product to the customer).
I think we need to concentrate on steering the Web's growth in the right direction, instead of bitching about how much it set us back (and I agree, it did, but it's a "platform cost" that was/is worth paying if you want to "ride the wave" instead of sinking with your favorite ship and then swimming back to the surface every time a new Smalltalk ship show up floating, then sinks and then a new one comes and so on... as an example, even choosing to develop a desktop app or a native iOS app instead of an HTML5/Javascript one with minimal backend is basically "riding a sinking ship", even if you'll make profit out of it and even if you'll deliver a better product to the customer).