You lose the developers, you lose the platform. That's what Bill Gates was thinking. Microsoft was "lucky" that: 1. JVM was too slow to run desktop apps on ma

You lose the developers, you lose the platform. That's what Bill Gates was thinking. Microsoft was "lucky" that: 1. JVM was too slow to run desktop apps on machines even in the early 2000s 2. Web and Javascript became so important that it reduced the impact of losing out on Java 3. Linux killed Sun Microsystems. Still, so much server infrastructure runs on Linux+JVM stacks that you could argue that it was a major reason Microsoft failed to gain dominance outside their desktop stronghold. Years later, their biggest existential threat in the form of Android was basically a modified Linux+JVM stack. People may think Bill was over-pessimistic, but looking back, their failure to kill off potential competitors like Java was one of the reasons Microsoft stagnated post-2000s.