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I was pointed to this interview with Tim Bray (of Sun). His comments on RSS are interesting, but I laughed out loud reading this:

Q: You have said that the claims of pundits that .NET is a threat to Java technology's future are silly. And that .NET fails to hit the 80/20 point where you do 20% of the work and see 80% of the benefits.

A: Java 1.0, when it first came out, was very lean and mean. And that was excellent, because people could learn it and become proficient in it quickly. Since then, the Java language has grown into its current, sophisticated, expansive shape. It's going to be tougher for .NET to replicate that kind of successful growth.

Many of the design decisions about .NET were made before it came out. But with Java 1.0, the community collectively was able to build all the extra layers that make up what we have now.

I guess Tim doesn't remember that all the new things in Java 1.5 (or is it Java 5 now?) were either copied from .NET (auto-boxing) or rushed through after noticing that they were part of .NET (generics). He's had the Kool-Aid, just like Scoble over at MS....