...It's a common theory that the reason that Apple isn't where Microsoft is today is because of their refusal to license the MacOS during the mid 80s....Sun's refusal to embrace native client side widgets is what allowed Microsoft to catch up to where Java is now with .Net....via [Russell Beattie Notebook]

I think Russell's right. The most striking thing to me when I jumped from Java to .NET was how absolutely foolish I felt for having abandoned native OS widgets and integration. One of my most memorable dot-com experiences was bringing on a contract programmer at $150 / hour to implement a single custom widget in Swing and having him fail to do it in four weeks. Even though it was complex, I'd estimate I could duplicate it in 3-5 days with .NET.