There’s no contradiction here. Both things are true. The engineers at MS thought Java was a great idea, and built a world-class implementation team for it. Of

There’s no contradiction here. Both things are true. The engineers at MS thought Java was a great idea, and built a world-class implementation team for it. Of course they added P/Invoke (easy DLL native code integration) and COM interop because that’s naturally what you need in the Windows environment. There was plenty of enthusiasm for Java in the MS engineering community. From MS’s business perspective, that was also great for the 3-E strategy, and more Windows-specific features were encouraged. From Sun’s business perspective, that went totally against the cross-platform Java strategy and was grounds for war. The business folks had a major falling-out, and the same MS engineering team, now legally prevented from working on Java, built a better Java (CLR) for Windows software with the lessons learned. The real disconnect on the engineering side was that the MS engineers thought of Java as just another language they could implement and improve on (like C), whereas Sun engineers thought of Java as a world-changing initiative where the WORA abstraction layer was paramount. Source: I was there.