After so many hacks, why won't Java just go away?

The article conflates Java with just the browser plugin on windows. The current state of Java on Windows and the browser plugin are clearly not acceptable, but Java is mostly used server side. All of Hadoop is written in Java. Most Apache projects are implemented in Java. The JVM is used by other languages too (Closure, Scala, JavaScript, etc) By all means kill the browser plugin, but please stop conflating it with Java.

Oracle need to get their act together, no doubt. But there's still a lot of value in having a widely available, nearly ubiquitous, cross-platform runtime like Java. JNLP / JWS is amazing technology, but hampered by Sun having been SOOOOO late to the game in terms of delivering the Consumer JRE and failing to deliver the APIs needed to truly make Java useful on the desktop.

But even today, if Oracle would really commit to Java as a desktop platform, I believe it could still succeed. Adding proper support for modern video / audio formats would be a nice start. Well, aside from fixing the security issues.