.NET made different decisions.

I was at a conference on scientific programming in Java very early on that Geoff Fox put on up at Syracuse and we had a list of requests from Sun that they didn't give us but Microsoft gave many of them right away.

On the other hand I really like Java's all-virtual approach to inheritance because the .NET model gives programmers more ways to screw up and get confused.

Both languages slipped in generics after 1.0. Java used type erasure in a way that made it so a List<String> is really a List so generics could be retrofitted easily to existing code. .NET's implementation of generics let you do more but caused a rift in the ecosystem between generic and non-generic collections.

I'd say long term Oracle's stewardship of Java has been very good. JDK 8 puts lambdas on your fingertips with a very fluent syntax that belies the idea that Java is terribly verbose. Since then Java has gotten steadily better release after release while maintaining great compatibility.

I work with people who are conservative about updates because they are worried about breaking things but for the last few LTS releases I've said "it ought to be really easy, let's give it a try" and it is really easy and we get performance improvements we can feel.

Java stagnated for quite a while. Seemed like everyone was stuck on Java 6 for about a decade. But JDK8 was a huge step forward. Lambdas, streams, and a date/time API that is the best I've seen.