Since the early 2000 the majority of Oracle GUI tools across their products are written in Java.
Long before acquiring Sun, Oracle did acquire Bea.
Oracle still sells Bea Weblogic JEE container and the J/Rockit JVM, which also has a real time version.
They have their own JSF framework and IDE.
So becoming Java steward is not so strange.
But what really happened is people who had been locked into Sun with legacy software wrote applications in Java and then switched from Sun to cheaper hardware running Linux or Windows.
Sun called it: Mankind vs Microsoft [1]
It drained their energy and stole their focus.
It was the apex of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish
[1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/04/03/why_sun_threw/
Interesting from that 2004 piece
> Microsoft's biggest global competitors are exactly as they were on Thursday: Nokia and Sony.
How different things looked then!
No, but they have an awful lot of downside from not maintaining it.
Consider the history of IBM, their grand strategy in the early 90s was that Smalltalk would be the enterprise language of the next few decades. The Java juggernaut rode roughshod over IBM. Or Microsoft, they would have loved to have kept Visual Basic and Visual C++ cash cows going forever, Java completely blindsided them. Altho' it may be technically less powerful than Smalltalk or C++, in terms of mindshare (or hype if you prefer) Java is too powerful for Oracle to risk falling into anyone else's hands.
No one you know.
Suppose some large and wealthy entity has trouble running some money-making legacy application that happens to be running atop the JVM. Who do you think will they call to fix their issues asap?
.. Which is why there's a lot of interest in having the people working on the JVM on your payroll ..