Ask HN: Why did Java get so popular in enterprises?

Much of this can be credited to a few things:

- Sun already had a massive presence as a big-iron enterprise IT company, and machines running Solaris were everywhere; when such a primary vendor starts pushing a brand new platform, many of their customers follow

- The language itself is reasonably well designed, if a little verbose, but very consistent and well documented

- The Internet was booming and the prospect of writing write-once-run-anywhere applets for the browser JVM with superior interactivity compared to anything else at the time was very compelling

It’s a language that’s easy to spec out an architecture and hire an army of ants to bang it out. (I had a client who literally hired like 1,500 people for 18 months to deliver 1.0 of the core system for their business)

It was a win for everyone. Big enterprises got to ditch cobol, it generates oodles of services revenue, you need lots of boxes and it drives sales of RDBMS and other high margin stuff.

I think Java EE is a driver for Java in enterprises today. Easy management, easy deploy and widespread knowledge. Almost any IT knows what to do if you give them an EAR/WAR.

Huge, enormous ecosystem - and plenty of developers ranging from super-junior to rockstar. It's somewhat enterprise-driven ie: it never breaks backwards compatibility

Strong backwards compatibility story.Huge ecosystem. Masses of developers.

Sun Microsystems pushed the hell out of it and Sun was the dominant server and workstation maker in the late '90s / early '00s. There weren't any alternatives with equally strong backing at the time, so it won out.