Sun intended Java to be an uber-platform, to get it running on everything from tiny embedded systems to their giant E10k systems. They'd make money selling JVM

Sun intended Java to be an uber-platform, to get it running on everything from tiny embedded systems to their giant E10k systems. They'd make money selling JVM licenses in various verticals. Sun bought into Netscape's vision of the web as the delivery platform for software. Java could run on the server side and then as applets in the browser on the client. The expansion of Java would then expand its use in places Sun wanted to charge for licenses. Java wouldn't create a moat around their hardware. It was intended to eliminate Microsoft's moat around the Windows platform. If ISVs could write software in Java that could be delivered by a browser on any OS, the actual OS stopped being important. As long as there was a browser and JVM available on a platform it could run that software.