By 2001 a lot of the problems java was designed to address were going away for other reasons. When it first came out it had some major advantages: It was free

By 2001 a lot of the problems java was designed to address were going away for other reasons. When it first came out it had some major advantages: It was free, so you could try it in the corporate setting without spending thousands of dollars, and your application would work on multiple operating systems without a recompile. I remember being involved in a project in which we developed and tested an application on PCs. One of our customers called up one day and asked if it worked on his linux box. "I have no idea," I said, "nobody's ever tried it." He tried it and it worked flawlessly. That doesn't seem like a big deal today with web apps, but in the late '90s it was black magic. Also, before Flash and before Javascript was good enough to build full-featured applications, pretty much the only way you were going to do an interactive web application was using java applets.