As I see it, Java succeeded where it was needed, and in the mid-late 90's, that was on the server. When the web emerged, there was no well established developme

As I see it, Java succeeded where it was needed, and in the mid-late 90's, that was on the server. When the web emerged, there was no well established development environment for server based applications. The tools for doing much beyond static web pages were pretty limited. Java and a whole bunch of Java based tools emerged to fill this need, and satisfy the needs of corporate customer for intranet solutions. On the desktop, Microsoft and C++ were already well established. In the browser, Sun did not offer a browser of their own, so Java depended on support from Netscape, Microsoft and eventually Google. Those companies all had their own technologies for browser development tools, and never tried very hard to support Java. Also Java was a little too much for many 90's era PC's connecting to the internet over dial-up connections, so it was slow.