If I had to pick a language that's "as significant as Java", I'd pick Golang way before Rust - and Golang has found significant success. The first genuinely usable version of Rust was only out in late 2018, so it's way too early to argue about its slow and "creeping" adoption curve.
> The second point is its easy to underestimate the dominance of Microsoft in those days. You think that Microsoft is dominant today, well, that's nothing compared to the late 1990's. Microsoft's market share was closer to 95% for the PC market.
By the late 1990s Linux had become a viable platform for a whole lot of things, and people were beginning to take notice. Most obviously, that probably put a big dent into the adoption of Windows NT as a server OS on x86 machines, which had been progressing quite well until the mid 1990s. That also probably helped Java because it meant you could seamlessly run your server workloads on "toy" x86 machines or on more "serious" platforms, without changing anything else.
> The second point is its easy to underestimate the dominance of Microsoft in those days. You think that Microsoft is dominant today, well, that's nothing compared to the late 1990's. Microsoft's market share was closer to 95% for the PC market.
By the late 1990s Linux had become a viable platform for a whole lot of things, and people were beginning to take notice. Most obviously, that probably put a big dent into the adoption of Windows NT as a server OS on x86 machines, which had been progressing quite well until the mid 1990s. That also probably helped Java because it meant you could seamlessly run your server workloads on "toy" x86 machines or on more "serious" platforms, without changing anything else.