Also - you have to remember that in the late 90's / early 2000's, Windows was at peak dominance, nearly 100% of developers at work were stuck with a Windows desktop to develop on. At the same time nearly all servers were linux or maybe solaris. So how are you going to develop on Windows and deploy on Unix? C++ was a nightmare, scripting languages were far from ready ... Java was really transformational in how it gave a complete, totally portable standard library in a mature language framework. All these things are take for granted today.