[nostrademons]

Sun, perhaps, with Java. Business-wise, it makes very little sense for a company that makes expensive proprietary hardware to develop a programming language that lets you write once and run anywhere.

The connection is pretty tenuous though - Linux may've eaten Sun's lunch anyway. But it would've been a little harder if we had to port all our #ifdef'd C++ software from Sun servers to commodity Linux Dell boxes, instead of just moving a few JAR files over.

[teej]

I'm still not seeing that connection, as it lowered the barriers to entry of using their product and gave them the platform to say "we have the best hardware for running Java".

[nostrademons]

It lowered the barriers to entry for using everybody else's product too, though. I think it probably helped other people more than Sun, though. IIRC, the Sparc had a pretty advanced development environment in the mid-90s, yet developing on/for a Linux system in the same time period was pretty painful.

And they said "we have the best hardware for running Java", but the average business doesn't care. They just want their software to run, cheaply and fast. Everybody I know runs their Java apps on commodity Dell servers. Maybe it was different in the first dot-com boom; IIRC, Sun servers were the big thing back then.