I think he simply meant that Java was marketed and therefore prospered as a counter to Microsoft's dominance more generally. You're right that .Net (and the CLR) came later in the story ...as a counter to Java.
Slightly earlier he did discuss the general alliance against Microsoft. I thought it was funny he didn’t mention Netscape as part of the alliance. At the time they were considered far more important than IBM or Oracle for purposes of displacing Microsoft on the consumer side.
It’s fine in the grand scheme of things, a younger person who was not there trying to reconstruct what happened and slipping up a bit. But for someone who cares about the details of this sort of history I didn’t want to absorb any similar errors about Common Lisp which I’m genuinely curious to learn about.
A couple of C# features were born in J++, namely P/Invoke (J/Direct), events (influenced by Delphi before even Anders came to MS), and Windows Forms (WFC).