Miguel de Icaza on on J2EE domination

Miguel explains in an interview why J2EE has such a stranglehold in the application server market:

There is a segmentation of the application server space, which is the high-end market, the mid-market, and the low market. The low market is anything that costs less than $200,000 to develop and deploy. It includes every technology that you’ve heard of. Then you’ve got the high market, which is any project where the cost of deployment is over two million dollars, and in that market J2EE is firmly entrenched. There is no other technology considered today in that application space. In part that’s because people need to have multiple vendors providing the same solutions, so they like the fact that there’s BEA and there’s IBM and there’s Sun. There’s different J2EE providers. There’s also different hardware providers. So that market is very hard for Microsoft to penetrate.

"That leaves the mid-market, which today is about 50% Java, with the other 50% made up of ASP.NET, and a couple of other proprietary frameworks."