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I once used the Basic Stamp in a product prototype - a fairly sophisticated piece of instrumentation. I initially chose the Basic Stamp (iirc it had a Ubicom chip) for its totally rock solid RS-232. Eventually I realized that the Basic Stamp was enabling me to write firmware for a reasonably complex "real time" control system. Over thousands of cycles of tests on a limited production run I never had a single glitch or problem with the firmware.

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The Basic Stamp is still a rock solid platform. I know of places using it in production systems without any issues. The problem is how its been replaced in the mind of the hobbyist (at least the younger ones). Before the arduino, you basically went with a PIC16F84 or a Basic Stamp. The Atmels were available, but IMO, they weren't as popular.

Plus BASIC feels "old" these days. People get introduced to programming trough the web (which uses C-style syntax languages like Javascript), scripting with Pyton/Ruby, or mobile development which follows the same pattern. Even though BASIC is a fine language (it was my first) people can't relate to it anymore.

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