Why Java was so popular (unlike other langs) in the late 90s and the 2000s?

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Dev Genius

6 min readJul 26, 2021

The 3 main factors that favoured it on its popularity were: Garbage Collection, Cross-Plattform Compatibility and Marketing (LOTS OF MARKETING)

Even though many other languages were created few years before the release year of Java (in 1995) or some other languages had been in existence way before such date, Java became incredibly popular partially due to the removal of certain limitations that were incredibly annoying amongst the IT community; such as some of the ones that were mentioned in the subtitle:

>> Automatic Memory Management (a.k.a. Garbage Collection):

Even though nowdays Manual Memory Allocation at certain cases is no longer a heavy burden in programming due to its main advantage that it actually can help to increase code performance (like in Rust or in Game Development with C++), during those years it simply was, and that finally there was a language available that could perform memory allocation automatically was (and still is) an innovative and amazing helping tool.

>> Cross-Plattform Compatibility:

That no programmer no longer had to worry about making a piece of code compatible for various plattforms (for different Operative Systems, CPU Architectures, etc.), but that it could just run on any machine that had the Java Virtual Machine (a.k.a. JVM) installed was also an innovative feature for a programming lang.

And now the rest of reasons from which it got a highly-increasing popularity:

>> Marketing, literally millions invested on Marketing:

Back then (in 2003), when Sun Microsystems was still in existence and wasn’t yet fully acquired by Oracle, it invested about $500 million on marketing for just advertising Java (yeah, you read it right, FIVE HUNDRED MILLION U.S. DOLLARS), lots of ads and commercials of all sorts were made on what was addressed as the “Java Powered Campaign” (as it can be read on this article by “The Register”).

Even a James Bond movie-like commercial was made (something that went on and on like this: “Agent you have this gadget made with JAVA technology, this other one made with JAVA technology and finally this one that was also made with JAVA technology; if you think I just made that up, I will attach the URL to such video right here).

>> It met the market’s needs of those years:

The Object-Oriented Paradigm was and at certain extent it still is what meets the market’s needs in the IT field.

Some of the langs that were created before Java just didn’t “meet” the market’s needs, either because the main paradigm that other langs were mainly based on wasn’t Object-Oriented (such as with Python, which on its start was based on the Functional paradigm) and the ones that were OOP didn’t include Java’s unique features that were the most wanted.

>> Sun Microsystems was mostly dominating the market:

This blog article which quotes Mike Grospe’s book on “Marketing Campaign Development” on a specific section on how Sun structured a better marketing strategy states that in 1997, about 75% of the servers on which the internet was relying on were running on an O.S. created by Sun (the Sun Solaris O.S. to be specific) and that nobody really knew that, and you might be wondering: what does that even have to do with Java?

Well, that most, say, people were already dependent on Sun’s services and products, so Sun Microsystems no longer had to continue thinking about developing and creating brand new products, but instead about how they could stand out in the IT market as the leader of such market and to also start thinking about how to enhance their already exisiting products, for example and in this case, the “Java Applets”, which are pieces of code that can be attached or “incrusted” in HTML pages in order to make a web page more interactive and stylized (in summarize, it’s embebbed code within HTML and it’s also something that has been fully replaced with JavaScript and CSS, therefore is now deprecated, but reiterating, back then that was an incredibly innovative technology to work with).

So, after Sun realized that, they created a brand new team that would be in charge of marketing not only their products and services, but also their already existing dominance in the market and hence they started marketing Java (with all the “Java Powered” campaign) in order to make it and show it as the dominant programming lang in the market.

And not only that, during the “Java Powered” campaign, Java-based Operative Systems were a standard on many devices, including certain models of some mobile-phone and mobile-devices brands (some highly-known brands that used to manufacture “Java Enabled Mobile Phones” were Alcatel, Blackberry, Dell, HP, Motorola, Nokia and many others in an extensive list that goes on and on, and can be seen right here), just imagine it as what Android is nowdays with its standard apps from Google.

(Also, that it was highly used for Mobile Game Development, on a list of games that be seen in a video right here and another video list of such games here).

>> From its release date, it went (partially) Open-Source:

As James Gosling once stated a few years ago (and such statement can be read in this article by “InforWorld”):

“The source code for Java was available to all from the first day it was released in 1995; what we wanted out of that was for the community to help with security analysis, bug reporting, performance enhancement, understanding corner cases, and a whole lot more. It was very succesful”

Apparently the original license was for inspection and the use of the source code internally, but its redistribution wasn’t allowed.

Finally in 2006, it went “full” (and I wrote that in-between quote marks, because apparently due to some members of the IT community stating that the lang isn’t yet fully open source-friendly, even today, and such statements can also be read on the previous linked article) open-source under the GNU License alongside the first appearance of Java’s mascot ‘Duke’.

This gave an enormous advantage for Sun over its competitors (and no, I’m not talking about Duke, but about Java going partially open-source), as for example, Microsoft in the very early 2000s (2001 to be exact) was… say, waging war against all forms of open-source software as former Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer, stated in that year that Linux is a cancer alongside the GNU GPL (GNU General Public License) as he (implicitly) described that it could heavily affect their business model on their products (such statement can be read right here); although in 2004 Microsoft started to slowly change their mindset, but it wasn’t enough to make C# more popular than Java, and as part of the very low amount of efforts performed by Microsoft to extend the lang’s usage in Open-Source Software Development, it only agreed in 2005 to not sue any developers who have had or were violating the lang’s patents when it came to the creation of non-profit projects.

(Also the fact that during the 2000s, C# had just being created and was still making its baby-steps on being developed to be the language that we know today).

(And also, instead of trying to boost C# for its usage on open-source, just as mentioned before, F# lang was the one that got released under the Apache License in 2005; and for those who don’t know about such lang, this one is based on the Functional paradigm).

In conclusion,

it wasn’t only Java’s unique features that helped itself to stand out, but also Sun’s monopolistic dominance over the market on many devices that were relying on their products and services, and their excellently-funded marketing strategies that made it way more popular than many other languages.