A few days ago I was at a lecture at my company about .NET. It's not part of my work, but since I got interested after a collegue told me that it can be seen as the Microsoft equivalent of J2EE, which I'm currently trying to learn.

Some quotes I remember:

"Visual C++.NET has just very little to do with C++, it was better not to call it C++."
"Microsoft technicians didn't want C#. At a presentation of C# a Microsoft technician showed how, by just changing some keywords and notations, a C# program can be compiled by the Java compiler. It were the marketeers who wanted C#."
"From a technical point of view, the .NET technology doesn't differ very much from J2EE. In terms of capabilities, they are equal."
"Microsoft does not guarantee that later versions of the Visual Studio .NET compilers will be compatible with current versions."
"The only point at which .NET is better than J2EE is it's tooling."
So from a technical point of view, both .NET and J2EE are very capable technologies and almost equal at that point.

I was wondering why company would use .NET instead of J2EE? A lot of companies already use Microsoft technologies, so I can imagine they will choose .NET instead of J2EE. But I guess there must be more reasons. Or will .NET not be the success which Microsoft marketing department says it will be in future?