Sun, IBM and the other Unix companies were in a bitter fight with MS, especially at the mid-tier. Java, notably Enterprise Java, became the teeth of that fight

Sun, IBM and the other Unix companies were in a bitter fight with MS, especially at the mid-tier. Java, notably Enterprise Java, became the teeth of that fight. With Java, it let the hardware makers do what they do best -- make hardware. It let the OS designers do what they do best -- design OSes. While the Unix "shell" experience was commoditized, the kernels certainly were not. The management of the systems still had proprietary magic pixie dust to help distinguish the products. The fact that Java per se couldn't necessarily directly take advantage of these OS developments isn't germane since the bulk of the work, especially at the time, was in the back end databases. And those COULD take advantage of the platforms. But all of them could leverage the management capabilities of the platform. Java was just the high level, portable business logic layer. Java was the safe solution that didn't require total commitment to a platform. Java was the rising tide to lift all boats that let the hardware folks sell and compete at the hardware level, especially against a company with monopolist, "lock in" tendencies such as Microsoft. Write your software in Java, pick all of these platforms to deploy on, each shining in their own special way. By developing and promoting Java, which was not just Sun, IBM and others did a lot of Java work as well, it expanded the overall market for their hardware. Sure, it opened the door to Intel et al, but Intel wasn't able to compete at the high end where Sun and IBM were able to compete. Later, of course, as CPUs improved, there was less and less need for larger computers. Especially when "the network is the computer", allowing diverse, smaller computers to compete with larger monolithic systems. Where Sun struggled was turning around from a hardware company to a services company. Oracle and IBM are both service companies. One happens to make a popular database, the other happens to make some, today, niche hardware. Sun, with its engineering core, wasn't really able to make that leap. HP tired to do the same thing, perhaps with less success. But Java wasn't what killed Sun. Java helped them all rally and fight against MS, and thrive.