Two points: The hype accomplished something that would be otherwise impossible: it established Java as a language in what was likely record time. Consider anot

Two points: The hype accomplished something that would be otherwise impossible: it established Java as a language in what was likely record time. Consider another popular language: Python. It was created about 5 years earlier, yet it rose to prominence about a decade later. Or consider Rust. It is, in many respects, as significant as Java. While major developers were shipping significant applications written in Java within 5 years, Rust is only creeping into important software a decade after its introduction. The second point is its easy to underestimate the dominance of Microsoft in those days. You think that Microsoft is dominant today, well, that's nothing compared to the late 1990's. Microsoft's market share was closer to 95% for the PC market. The workstation market was starting to crumble due to competition from Microsoft and Intel. About the only thing that was safe were mainframes, and that was highly dependent upon one's definition of safe. Nearly everyone who was competing against Microsoft wanted to see a chunk taken out of them, which meant pretty much everyone since Microsoft had its fingers in so many markets. And, as it turns out, nearly everything did have to be rewritten. Sometimes it was to deliver SaaS over the Internet and sometimes it was to target mobile devices.