His argument that "there are four completely different things that go by the name 'Java'", and about Sun's incompetence at positioning it is still pretty devast

His argument that "there are four completely different things that go by the name 'Java'", and about Sun's incompetence at positioning it is still pretty devastating. I pine for an alternate universe where Sun deftly parried Microsoft's Java to their benefit instead of repeatedly screwing themselves over. Sure, MS management wanted to fuck over Sun, but the grunts writing the software really legitimately wanted Java to be the best language to write GUI apps in for Windows. Unfortunately the language itself was nowhere near ready for that (much less the standard libraries), so they improved the language. Sun promptly freaked the fuck out. The end result is that progress was delayed by a decade (especially on Windows), and Microsoft ended up with sole control over the only decent industrial development platform for GUI applications. The world would be a much better place if C# and the CLR were forks of Java and the JVM, with features percolating in both directions towards eventual standardization.