Part of that may also have been the greenfield development nature of JavaSoft; it's often easier to make rapid progress if you don't have to be backward compati

Part of that may also have been the greenfield development nature of JavaSoft; it's often easier to make rapid progress if you don't have to be backward compatible with preexisting APIs etc. And from what I heard, Sun as a whole was a highly dysfunctional company as well, even during the time in question. The dot com boom just papered over a lot of the dysfunction for a few years.