[bboreham]

Recall that at the time Java was set to make Windows irrelevant. Microsoft had a massive success, via XML, in derailing this future.

To explain a little, the Sun position was "use Java to write everything; then it all talks together nicely". But folks realised they could use XML to tie different pieces together and relegated Java to the server. Yes, there were other other ways to interop, eg CORBA, but they were ugly, expensive and heavyweight.