[throwaway19937]

> The company that created Java went out of business and was sold to Oracle for a fraction of its original worth. So Java was a business failure -- or at least I'd be interested to see someone defend Java as a business success.

Sun and its peers declined because PCs running Linux became good enough; selling commodity hardware is a different business model (https://yarchive.net/comp/sgi_market.html) and it's incredibly difficult to move down market.

Oracle acquired Sun because they didn't want Java be owned by a competitor (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-oracle-alphabet-trial/ora...). Java was also why IBM offered to buy Sun; it seems hard to consider Java a business failure when it's most of the remaining value of the business.