Battle of Sun vs Microsoft
This competition is getting more serious,I got couple of newsletters from some major consulting companies on this issue, so I decided to find out whats happening there, the actuall story started when Microsoft didn't ship the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) with Windows XP edition, have a look at this Open Letter(!) from Microsoft about Sun's concern on this issue. After Microsoft introduced .NET as a unified architecture for enterprise solutions in front of Sun's J2EE architecture, Sun decided not to give up very soon, so they introduced ONE (Open Net Architecture) based on J2EE for enterprise solutions shortly after Microsoft's announcement. but the story didn't finish here when Microsoft announced JUMP as a solution to migrate from Java architecture to .NET, here is an article from Sun about JUMP.
Anyway, Sun realised that this is a real challange, so the two IT giants decided to battle and see what customers will go on with finally.
I went through couple of comparisons from different kind of experts, here is the summary of which I went through:
Will .Net take down Java in 2002? In this article vendors like ComponentSource show their feedback results from developers that most of developers will use .NET next year, but no one claims which technology is better.
WHERE ARE WE GOING... VB.NET vs. JAVA Mike Landau the CEO of SetFocus think regarding the scalability of .NET and its support for several languages and its more common Platform, .NET has more chance to win
J2EE vs. Microsoft.NET An in-depth comparison of both technologies I recommend you read this one if you want to choose one of them.
After reading all these articles and some others that you can find easily by searching the web,I myself think like before Microsoft will win with its greate marketing campaign but it can't go up from a rigid point over, Basically Microsoft products are not performing well when the size of a business is larger than a mid-sized Enterprise,and this is true because the underlying layers(Like Operating System itself) of .NET are still suffering from unstabillity, lower performance and other known problems.