Slashdot | McNealy Created Millions of Jobs?:

they have lost control(Score:5, Insightful)
by penguin-collective (932038) on Saturday April 29, @04:59PM (#15229349)
Well, and what actually happened with the strategy Sun adopted? Sun lost control to "Microsoft bastardization"--.NET is essentially an incompatible Java, completely with Java backwards compatibility.

If Sun had turned Java into an open standard, every Linux system would be using Java now, for both desktop and server apps, many of Java's technical bugs would be fixed, and C# would have ended up like VisualBasic. Instead, Sun's move allowed Microsoft to take the high ground and make C# an open standard. The open source community has created multiple C# implementations and gone to work innovating and improving the platform, as well as integrating it with the Linux desktop. As a result, some really nifty Linux desktop apps are being written in C#. And, as a bonus, there are also open source .NET implementations, giving developers easy cross-platform capabilities between Windows and Linux should they desire that.

BTW, this is a repeat of the NeWS disaster; that, too, was a nice core idea, the design had some serious flaws, the implementation was mediocre at best, and ultimately the industry rejected it because Sun was waffling on whether to open it or not. Sun apparently doesn't learn from their mistakes.