There was also J#, though it wasn't really anticompetitive. Maybe it was just the opposite, now that I think about it. Microsoft obviously felt that .NET, C#, and the CLR were viable competitors to Java and the JVM, and offered J# as a sort of on-ramp from the Java cowpath to the .NET expressway.

That's not meant as a knock against the Java world now; I just remember .NET being a pleasant place to be back in those days.

2.0 which introduced generics (and the partial keyword. code behinds yeesh) was when it REALLY took off.

.NET is actually a continuation of J++, which was Microsoft's Java implementation plus their extensions, like delegates, which were also introduced in .NET

To be honest, I don't think the engineers had any ploy to "run Java into the ground", even though the sale folks probably thought about it. They did do their usual "embrace, extend" thing. And it was sort of anti-competitive, but then again the JCP isn't a real standards body given the TCK has to be licensed from Sun/Oracle with whatever conditions they feel like, which is why Apache Harmony didn't survive.

And so I have no interest in defending the moves of Sun wanting to defend what was at that point a completely proprietary and non-standard platform.