Java was the 800lb gorilla thanks to Sun's marketing.

Write Once Runs Everyone has been the promise of several bytecode formats since UNCOL in 1958, with UCSD Pascal being the most famous one until Java came to be.

Smalltalk was already taking off when Java came to be, it had a role similar to .NET on Windows, on OS/2, with SOM (OS/2's version of COM), doing C, C++ and Smalltalk.

All IBM Visual Age IDEs were written in Smalltalk, however it was exactly IBM alongside Oracle that were the very first to jump onboard to the Java ship.

Thus one day of the other, Smalltalk was out, and Java in.

Eclipse started as a rewrite from Visual Age into Java, and many of the Java early frameworks were ports from Smalltalk.

Also note that while Java has a C++ like syntax, its execution model is closer to Smalltalk and Objective-C, thus why it was such a great fit for Sun, acquiring StrongTalk and re-purposing the JIT compiler into Hotspot.

== Long-ago, Smalltalk systems could be file-copied from say win to mac to unices and would just work.

== Not standardized. Language vendors used proprietary code to lock-in customers and that fragmented the skills base. Skilled Smalltalk-A programmers were not-so-skilled with Smalltalk-B.

== Not free as in beer.