People are overrating language features I believe. The thing Sun did really well was marketing. They didn't go only to the core "tech" people in the enterprise: they reached _everybody_, and made it look like every company had to "move" to Java because it was the "future" even if few people understood what it was. Soon there were CEOs and CFOs and whatever talking on Bloomberg (or whatever) about how they were "moving" to Java.

For whatever reason IBM also jumped on that ship, and Oracle, and HP, and even Microsoft (albeit reluctantly) so "nobody ever got fired for choosing Java" became a reality.

Now that Java has been around for a long time we tend to forget this, but people couldn't even define what they were talking about back then - was it a language? JEE? A runtime environment? But they sure as hell were moving to Java.

Same as this "Internet" thing really.