http://www.onjava.com/lpt/a/2408

While Sun is quite diligently planning, coordinating, and building infrastructure for building cathedrals around J2EE, Microsoft's .NET is poised to steal the marketplace and own the bazaar, as they did with VB and the component market in the client-server wars. We have some parallels to go by. While CORBA focused on rearing thoroughbreds, COM stole the market with a mule called VB.

The only way out of this quandary is to wake up and invite the J2EE cathedral to the bazaar. (Both words are used in a positive sense in this article.) I believe there is a lot at stake; not only for Sun and Java, but also for regular programmers like you and me. The potential of enabling programmers of all kinds to this work in this wonderful world of the Web is a prize worth contending for.