To be fair Microsoft wanted to adopt Java, and with J++ they added Windows specific base libraries and make it work with COM. One could still compile ordinary J

To be fair Microsoft wanted to adopt Java, and with J++ they added Windows specific base libraries and make it work with COM. One could still compile ordinary Java back then also with J++. Although they weren't allowed to do that if I remember right, so they basically had to create C# - and C# turned out to be fantastic in my opinion.