It was going to run on every device in my kitchen, and they were all going to talk to each other. Instead the first niche it found was J2EE, and that "write once, run anywhere" was a bit comical, because who swaps out the OS on their server?
It was apparently good enough to be the choice for Android and similar, but that was much later.
It's really difficult to describe how people -- especially non programmers -- bought into the hype surrounding Java.
I've since seen a bit of that hype around some things, but never to that extent: XML, SPA, a strange obsession with tiled widgets.
The first niche was applets. A managed language with a batteries-included library, familiar syntax and cross-platform GUI story was a new thing at the time.
ps: I forgot, the JVM spec was a good thing, it made a lot of things sound for people, so easier deployments and less inconsistencies.
It's interesting in today's era of Rust, that people think of Java as failing to replace C++; in practice, it was only 90% successful, and managed to replace the vast majority of cases where people did use it.
About the only things that didn't get replaced were (some) desktop gui apps, and apps that were so tiny that they weren't worth the launch of the JVM.
But you got me curious.. what kind of backend code was written in c++ ? did people write server side logic in it ? I remember seeing some Oracle C code but it felt like a strange thing and not a c/c++ land. But to be honest that's not my world.