We might live in a much different world today if Microsoft had not *deliberately* set out to kill Java in the browser in the mid 90s. MS saw Java and Netscape as a threat to their business model so they licensed the technology from Sun, put it in their browsers and then made sure that it would remain slightly broken and never be updated. Everyone in the industry saw this coming and at the time Sun talked about how great their lawyers were and how they had compatibility clauses in the contract, etc.... Microsoft's lawyers were better apparently.
Microsoft left a slightly broken and very early 1.x release of Java in their browsers for years and years. The motivation was clear in court documents during the antitrust litigation with quotes from people inside Microsoft saying things like: we have to ''pollute'' Java in the browser to keep it from being truly cross platform.
Imagine what the world would be like today if, instead of edging ever closer to a full fledged programming model in the browsers based on JavaScript (which was created to be glue to put Java into HTML, not to be a programming language) - if instead we had 20 years of browsers with native Java VMs, written in and extensible by Java... There is no doubt we would have had the kind of applications we take for granted today (AJAXy things like gmail and maps) 15 years ago... and a generation of developers would not have grown up with this mess that we left them in HTML and JS.
- Pat Niemeyer (Author of Learning Java, O'Reilly & Associates)