I wrote this months ago, but worth repeating- from a Microsoft perspective, as Java was seen as the Microsoft platform killer by many:

“Java was a token threat. Bill knew it would not be performant enough on clients for Applets to succeed. They had to rebuild their language to put every fixed-size object on the stack because sorting an array<int> on a typical machine took forever. That’s why Java still doesn’t have operator overloading. That Java battle would be on the server, and [MSFT] didn’t have a good language to bring to the battle there. Wired and co loved to paint a picture of Microsoft v Java as Goliath v David. Not true - Java was a speedbump.

The real threat was dumb terminals (aka web browsers). Even today, the world could run on Mac OS / iOS and Safari. If Microsoft was okay with sacrificing Windows market share and instead controlled content and services, they would be much more valuable.”