Good for them. I thought that DabbleDB was really cool. Some of the things that they were doing with Seaside/Smalltalk were pretty out there. Eg, doing persistence by just persisting the entire Smalltalk VM image. Each customer got their own VM, which seems incredibly wasteful, but must have had tons of other benefits.
I think I remember reading that Viaweb was structured similarly; every user had their own clisp image.