The falling-behind happened early, and fast. MS took full advantage of second-mover status to change fast and add features. They also targeted fewer platforms i

The falling-behind happened early, and fast. MS took full advantage of second-mover status to change fast and add features. They also targeted fewer platforms initially. While the market niche was certainly aimed squarely at the same demographic as Java users, the language owes as least as much to Borland Object Pascal as it does to Java. Speaking of Object Pascal, MS also got Anders Hejlsburg to design it. Oracle/Sun, stuck with a huge, conservative enterprise user base, was shackled by backwards compatibility. In hindsight, I don't think it weird that Java fell behind the way it did.