I started my professional programming career in the Windows 3.x days. Some things that come to mind:

* The web solved the software distribution problem. There were some pretty good tools for building GUI apps in the 90s but the tools for getting software to the customer sucked. Complex installers, no autoupdates, "DLL hell" incompatibilities.

* There never really were any great tools for building cross-platform GUIs. You built for Windows on x86, that was it. Widgets were shipped as binary COM components. Now you need to be on multiple OSes, multiple hardware architectures, and multiple form factors. VB wasn't going to give you that.

* Formatting text sucked. Actually, formatting in general sucked - the RAD GUI builders built awesome fixed-size dialogs, but now screens vary from watch-sized to wall-sized. Embedded HTML components really made layout easier... and once you start putting things in HTML, it tends to take over.

* All those pretty 3d effects in Win 95 UIs? Those were a bitch to get right. Hours of trial and error drawing extra lines of black and white and grey pixels. It looked good but it was a lot of effort that would have been better spent building real features.

There are more or less 2 major modes of managing a product relative to the current technological zeitgeist:

- expand to consume every new use case and buzzword that comes along. Survive in some form indefinitely, while the product becomes less concrete and meaningful over time. The product continues to succeed not because it is technically best in class any more, but sheer momentum of the large base of existing users it serves adequately

- remain focused to the original mission, delivering iterative improvements over time. Watch waves of loyal users get eaten away one after another by the tide of the current technological buzz

VB was mostly the second case, although it did have many cousins in the form of VBA and ASP. The original tool - VB itself, was only ever relevant to desktop computing. By the time it got merged into Visual Studio, I believe the RAD aspect of the tool had already mostly disappeared (although VS even today still offers some variety of the original experience!)

VB in its prime was a beautiful thing, and the experience AFAIK remains unmatched to this very day. I've pined for a "client/server VB" on many occasions.

I guess, these application were oriented at single developers and small teams, which is also, why these found favorable access and controls in them. But this meant also that businesses had to own the technology, the know how, and the technology stack that come with it. Now, it's all about teams, favorably with interchangeable staff, who is hired on the fly, without a need to own localized know how, as anything is incorporated into the specific stack. (Owning technology is even a bit frowned on nowadays, as in the "not invented here syndrome" meme.) This is really, what facilitated the startup culture, we may observe today. On the other hand, this is also, why the stack is king and developers are to serve (insert Git, the JS framework of the day, etc).

The cheaper no-install/remote feature, regular subscription revenue model, and Agile dev cycle took precedence.

Even before all this happened I remember articles about software companies yearning/pleading for subscription revenue, but customers were not interested. The web allowed them to turn the tables on expectations.

A few advancements, such as excellent UI consistency were left behind though.

By the time the web caught up, a new generation of developers took over who had little to no exposure to RAD tools from the 90s.

I think it's two things:

- Very few use the desktop as their primary computer interface now compared to back then.

- We keep abstracting. The web browser has almost entirely abstracted away the OS. You run Windows 7, or OS X? Who cares, just log into this web page and do your thing there.

The really-RAD thing doesn’t have a good equivalent today, but I also think developers asked for something that created slightly more maintainable code even if at the cost of slightly less RAD.

C#/VB with WinForms was the successor to VB6 and doesn’t sacrifice much in terms of development speed but added a lot of modern conveniences (high dpi etc..) that would have cost too much to add to VB6.

For the developing perspective it's so much better, but consumers needs fancy login buttons and infinite scrolling instead of UI consistency and accessibility.

Also deliver binary executables has a huge attack surface of virus. Web is considered "safer"