One thing I've always wondered (and I don't intend this as a criticism per se), but why didn't they open source it? If it had a following outside of Fog Creek it might not have been an inevitable dead end.
While I hesitate to endorse a language based on VBScript, it seems like the extensions they added to it were pretty nice. I mean, if you're inclined to use a VBScript style language, Wasabi wasn't horrible, and given Spolsky's following and Fog Creek's mindshare, it seems at least possible it could have become a useful thing rather than a legacy thing to be replaced. I mean, at the very least, it's probably not worse than PHP. (Granted: my opinion of PHP is very low). Maybe it's for the best though, the world is probably better off without new wasabi projects.
Looking back, I regret not open sourcing it as well. Pre-.NET, we didn't want to spoil our cross-platform competitive advantage. Post-.NET, we didn't think there was much of a market for a VBScript-to-C# transpiler (wouldn't those people prefer VB.NET?), and besides, open sourcing it seemed like a lot of work for basically no benefit.
I get that, running an open source project can be very time consuming and expensive, and once it starts it becomes a part of your brand that cannot necessarily easily be dismissed. So it may have been wise not to open source it. I do think though, that wasabi was not obviously stupid or anything, and it probably could have had some amount of success in the wild.
While I hesitate to endorse a language based on VBScript, it seems like the extensions they added to it were pretty nice. I mean, if you're inclined to use a VBScript style language, Wasabi wasn't horrible, and given Spolsky's following and Fog Creek's mindshare, it seems at least possible it could have become a useful thing rather than a legacy thing to be replaced. I mean, at the very least, it's probably not worse than PHP. (Granted: my opinion of PHP is very low). Maybe it's for the best though, the world is probably better off without new wasabi projects.