From my experience, Java's killer feature was and always has been that you can throw significanty less capable programmers into the pool and not have such obvio

From my experience, Java's killer feature was and always has been that you can throw significanty less capable programmers into the pool and not have such obviously catastrophic outcomes with doing this as with C or C++. This mostly comes down to taking memory management off the table, although the smaller set of features in Java (compared to C++) is surely also a factor. I suspect that platform portability is a bit like database portability - it sounds nice but in practice most projects will have committed to a platform up front. Technical people understand that a technology that can drastically reduce LOC is a game-changer: you can hire far fewer programmers - these need to be better than your bucket-brigade Java folks of course, but that's OK because you're saving money on the quantity of them; you need fewer managers to coordinate everyone; the product itself will be better because it's had fewer fingers in the pie, and internal comms during development will have been better because the team was so much smaller. No, the big problem with this is that management in big corps simply do not believe that these sorts of savings are possible - it just seems too good to be true, and they are too risk-averse to rejig their organisations to the required extent; they also fear being beholden to a small priesthood of very clever technical people from which there is no way back - eg we can't ship our Clojure codebase back offshore to some commodity programmers because they won't be able to make head or tail of it.