[mechanical_fish]

It turns out that there is a level of abstraction where every desktop OS is just like every other. And Java evolved to exploit this common ground.

But the ultimate lesson was that the intersection of all operating systems is an awful place to live. Because Java's not-exactly-native widgets often have the wrong look, it feels generic. Because they often have subtly different semantics, it feels slightly alien. Because platform-specific behaviors like drag and drop generally don't work right, it feels like an outsider, even though it's running on your machine. And because the app requires a giant brick of a runtime that generally hasn't been preloaded by anything else, it starts so slowly that you can practically hear the gnomes turning the rusty crank on the starter motor.

And it's not as if these are fatal objections. Clearly, based on the success of the web, they are not. But the lesson has been: If you're going to run an idiosyncratically-designed slow-loading quirky app that's imprisoned in it's own window why not just run a web app. And that's what people do.