Both of these hits home. Working at Sun in the late 90's, Java was a big thing, and while Sun was clearly way too early in their push for a universal virtual machine that could run anything, at the time people were complaining that Java could never be used for real software because of it not being natively compiled and using a GC.

Well, now everyone are using Javascript and Python, and no one seems to be complaining.

The second point is true as well. No matter where the pendulum is at the moment, there are always going to be people trying to push it in the other direction. Sun was again ahead of the time by pushing the Javastation, which was trying to do what the Chromebooks are doing. Then there was the Sunray of course, which was really cool, but a bit too specialised.