Platforms and surface area
Both .NET and Java want to win the heart of the 'corporate developer' (aka known as the VB6/Powerbuilder/OracleTools/VisualFoxpro developer). If there is a winner in the .NET/Java war, it will be the one who captures that market.
The point is that the corporate developer really does not care about .NET and Java. They want to get their work done, and most of them were getting their work done with their previous tools. They don't like to learn new technologies a lot. They even don't like coding a lot.
What these developers need is to build applications with the least amount of programming possible.
Today, the amount of code we have to write to get our work done in .NET is less than in Java, but it's still a lot. That will improve with the upcoming releases of the .NET framework, but it will be still a lot.
This is from a Don Box post:
"Honestly, reducing surface area is important to all developers (not just VB devs) and keeping things manageable will be one of the biggest technical challenges we face over the next five years."
In VB6 there were a lot of 'black boxes', and in .NET one of the design goals was to not to have them. So they built a good core framework and then started to build things on top of it. This was the 'right' way to do it. The problem is that we need to wait until Microsoft builds all the abstractions on top of the framework so they can make the corporate developer's task as easy as it should be.
Even if it seems the right way, it is a very long way. I think they need to start from the other side. Start building the top black boxes, which is much easier than building white ones, and sometime they could eventually open those black boxes. The technical quality of the solution will be worse, but it will help them to win the war.
There are a lot of ISVs trying to do this kind of things. CASE tools were one failed example. Now we have MDA tools, rule engines, etc. Tools where you have an 'executable design' using code generation or any other technique. The problem is the big guys (Sun, IBM, MS) never embraced one, so these tools usually have a relatively small number of users, and are not an important force to push the platform.