I was at the Microsoft developer conference in Paris. The attendance at the beginning was a solid 1200 developer, at the end a mere 50! here is what happened; During the 4 hours show they spent 2 hours presenting IE4.0 and after the break started with "A word on Java".

First the french director of marketing asked "how many of you have used java" and about 75% of the room raised their hands he then asked "and of those, how many do have something out in production" a mere 30% raised their hands (wich i though was good enough!) and then proceded to bash java for all its weakenesses. For his grand finale he talked about Mocha and Wingdis saying that this is what happened with the byte-code, that anybody could decompile and read those precious lines you had sweated so much to code, bla bla bla.... and showed on a wide screen the decompilated code.

You would not believe it but the crowd started booing and hissing, granted that it wasn't a smart thing to do, and then silence again even on a bewildered stage, until somebody yelled "GO JAVA!" (which in french sounds like: "Allez Java!") and the whole room started cheering and applauding... the guys on stage physically stepped back and were obviously stunned that it would backfire like that.